President Obama's budget proposes to hike the marginal tax rates of the wealthy to 36% and 39.6% beginning in fiscal 2011, and to increase by 5% the capital gains and dividends tax rate for the wealthy - tax changes that market participants say could lead to higher demand for tax-exempt bonds.
"The Obama tax hike [on the marginal rates] would mean that muni investors could buy bonds about 40 basis points richer in yield to achieve the same after-tax yield," said Matt Fabian, a managing director at Municipal Market Advisors.
Wealthy would be defined as married couples earning over $250,000 and individuals earning $200,000 or more.
However, the administration has abandoned a proposal aired in a budget outline released in February that would have capped the amount of deductions taxpayers could take at 28%, another move that may have pushed wealthier investors into the muni market.
The most recent budget document also shows an even smaller estimate for how much the federal government will pay for the new Build America Bonds program than a document released Thursday.
However, market participants said the discrepancy does not really matter since the higher numbers were already underestimating the amount of payments that will be made under the program.
In an appendix to the budget released last week, the administration estimated that the Treasury Department would spend $91 million in fiscal 2009 and $340 million in fiscal 2010 on BABs, which it said included Recovery Zone Economic Development Bonds
But the Analytical Perspectives document released yesterday estimated just $50 million and $192 million for BABs during those years. Neither administration officials nor market participants could explain the differences in the estimates.
Treasury officials say roughly $9 billion of BABs have been issued during the past two months since the program started. Clifford Gannett, the director of the Internal Revenue Service's tax-exempt bond office, which is charged with processing the direct payments for those bonds, said Friday that doing "very conservative" math on those numbers indicates $90 million of payments on just those issuances.
It is possible that the budget numbers stem from revenue estimates put together when the BAB legislation was being drafted, well before anyone knew how popular they would become, sources said.
The BAB program, created by the stimulus law, allows governmental issuers to sell an unlimited amount of taxable debt and either receive a cash payment from the federal government or provide investors with a tax credit equal to 35% of the interest rate.
The Recovery Zone Bonds, $10 billion of which were authorized under the stimulus law, also would provide issuers with a cash subsidy, but that payment is equal to 45% of the interest rate, and there is no option to provide a tax credit to investors. The bonds are to be allocated to areas hit hard by unemployment in 2008.
The budget documents also provide some fresh details for the administration's estimated savings of phasing out the Federal Family Education Loan student loan program and moving to a system in which all federally guaranteed student loans are originated directly by the Department of Education. Many state-level FFEL lenders, who are opposed to the switch, issue municipal bonds backed by their student loans.
By ending "subsidies" paid to FFEL lenders, the budget documents estimate savings of $24 billion over five years and $48 billion over 10 years.
But an appendix to the budget proposal shows that the federal government has historically overestimated the costs of subsidies for FFEL while underestimating the costs of the direct loan program.
For the roughly $811.7 billion of FFEL loans originated since 1992, the cost of each loan averaged about 8.2 cents per dollar, compared to original estimates of about 10 cents. Issuance costs for the roughly $249.8 billion of direct loans were about 4.5 cents for each dollar loaned, compared to estimates of about 0.6 cents.
Almost three quarters of the budget's proposed $100.5 billion of grants to state and local governments would be used for transportation infrastructure, mostly highways.
The budget proposed some modest changes to transportation and infrastructure funding, including a new user fee that would fund the air traffic control system beginning in 2011.
The administration argued that the current excise tax that is levied on users based mostly on airline ticket prices should be replaced by a tax related to the cost of services provided by the Federal Aviation Administration. If such a measure is taken, it will generate $9.6 billion in 2011 and existing aviation excise taxes could be reduced, according to the budget.
The administration also confirmed in its budget that it hopes Congress will create a national infrastructure bank and fund it at $5 billion in fiscal 2010. However, only a portion of that would be spent in 2010, the budget said.
The budget estimated that the federal government will provide $73.4 billion of transportation in grants to state and local governments in fiscal 2010, up about $11 billion from this fiscal year. Federal transportation grants would reach $102.3 billion in fiscal 2019 under current policy, according to budget documents.
The administration also proposes a five-year, $5 billion high-speed rail state grant program that would add on to the stimulus funding provided for high-speed rail development.
In addition, the budget includes $3.9 billion for the clean and drinking water state revolving funds.
