Municipal-bond tax breaks face court challenge
US Supreme Court weighs whether states can give residents who buy munis preferential tax treatment.
By Margaret Price | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 5, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 3
If you've long viewed the municipal bond market as a sleepy, safe tax haven, with rarely much ruckus, you might want to consider what's brewing there now.
The US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case Nov. 5 that hits on a cornerstone of what makes this market attractive: a longstanding practice in many states of exempting interest on their own bonds from state-residents' income tax, while taxing interest on muni bonds issued out of state.
By definition, municipal bonds are those issued by state or local governments to raise money to finance projects and operations. While so-called "general obligation" muni bonds help fund everyday activities of state and local governments, "revenue bonds" finance specific projects, such as highways, airports, hospitals, and single and multifamily housing.
Such bonds have been popular, especially with those in upper-income tax brackets: As long as investors hold bonds issued by a government entity or agency in their own state, the bonds' interest payments are typically free of federal income tax, and in most states free from state and local income taxes as well.
Indeed, 43 states, including Kentucky, have tax laws that give preferential tax treatment to their own state's bonds over those issued out of state.
But in the case of the Kentucky Department of Revenue v. Davis, retirees George and Catherine Davis of Kentucky deem that arrangement unfair. In their argument, such preferential tax treatment obstructs interstate commerce in violation of the US Constitution's dormant Commerce Clause.
Kentucky appealed to the US Supreme Court after the Kentucky Court of Appeals in January 2006 ruled in favor of the Davises. Although many muni-market participants (and many legal experts) expect the high court to side with Kentucky and maintain the status quo in this matter, a decision favoring the Davises' position would jolt the muni market, many experts hold.
"It's the biggest case ever [for the muni bond market], because it has the potential to totally change" market dynamics, says Len Weiser-Varon, public finance partner at the law firm of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo, in Boston. Whereas the muni market is now "an in-state market in many states," a ruling for the Davises "has the potential to" make it into "a much more – almost exclusively – a national market."
Certainly, prices of muni bonds would be among the first affected. But declines in those markets would quickly spill over to the market at large, "influencing the overall benchmark yield curve," says Matt Fabian, managing director of Municipal Market Advisors in Concord, Mass. As prices decline by perhaps a point or more, bond yields could rise "by 10 to 20 basis points, on average, immediately." A basis point is 1/100th of a percent.
In addition, experts say states would need to start grappling with difficult choices – and ones that could take time to adopt. States would either have to tax interest on every state's municipal bonds or tax interest on no state's bonds.
RSS feed
