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OP SUB SB250 today! It is scheduled for a House hearing on Wednesday, December 17 at 9:30 AM. If passed out of there, it will go to a floor vote the same day or Thursday.
This is not an adoption reform bill!
Contact members of the House Healh and Aging Committee
Contact the Ohio House
Post comments about the bill here and here
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I’ve written at length about Ohio Sub AB 250, the “adoption reform” bill proposed by Ohio Right to Life and backed by the state’s adoption industry to “streamline the adoption process.” That is, make is easy to acquire newborns for desperate “empty-armed” paps (potential adoptive parents.)
The bill has a couple “small,” but very troubling aspects, hidden amongst the bigger troubling aspects one of which is the adoption tax credit, which I touched on slightly in my last blog.
Introduction: Adoption Tax Credits:
Ohio currently grants a non-refundable tax credit of up to $1500 to adopters. A drop in the bucket. SUB SB250 offers paps an up-to $10,000 non- refundable credit that can be spread out over several years. The current federal tax credit is $12,000 refundable I theory, then, if Sub SB250 passes, Ohio paps will be able to apply for up to $21,000 in tax credits for one adoption alone. Keep in mind that these tax credits are not for special needs placements for which they were intended originally, but all adoptions, including international. The only exception is stepparent adoption.
Before I go on, I want to mention that there has been online discussion urging enactment of family preservation tax credits for pregnant women considering surrender to help them keep their babies,Very few women in a relinquishment position, however, are in the tax bracket needed to get tax credits to start with. If they were, they would usually not be a financial crisis that’s pushing surrender.
Federal Adoption Credit Scam
To understand how a large increase in the Ohio adoption credit will affect 
Ohio’s tax revenues and adoption costs we need to go back and take a look at how adoption tax credits have affected them on the federal level.
Tax credits are a very complicated subject that I’m not even closely qualified to discuss with any authority. .St. Paul attorney and adoptive dad (and a good friend of Bastardette’s) Jim Hamilton, however, is and wrote a concise essay on this subject last year which I published in The Daily Bastardette. The title of the piece alone —What does America get for $500,000,000 a year in adoption tax credits.--makes us holler foul!
.$5 hundred million?
I’m not reposting the piece in its entirety, but I am posting two very important things that Hamilton wrote, that the adoption industry, special interests such as ORTL, and the government don’t want you to know about adoption tax credits…
(1) Federal tax credits cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue:
- Adoption tax credits increase the cost of adoptions, in two ways. First, by increasing the amount families are able to pay. Second, by increasing the number of families eligible to enter the market
and at the same time jack up the cost of adoption since agencies can load your tax credit on to the back end of your bill, thus subsidizing private business.
- Credits, in other words, increase the amount the market will bear and increase demand without increasing supply. Who wins? Those who profit from adoption and those adoptive families at the upperend of the economic ladder, so long as their incomes do not exceed the limits established by Congress.
(2) And on the federal level, how much are the taxpayers being soaked to subsidize the private adoption industry?
The numbers reported for domestic and international adoptions for 2010, again by the NCFA, were 22,000 and 29,005, respectively. While the NCFA’s numbers make it hard to see where the IRS got its figure, we can see that some 50,000 non-foster adoptions occurred that year . At even $10,000 per adoption, we paid at least $500 million in 2010 to subsidize these adoptions and more than $600 million if each family exhausted the full, refundable cr edit in that year. Small change in terms of the federal budget, perhaps, but not an insignificant sum for the adoption industry.
Ohio Adoption Tax Credit Figures
So how would this play out in terms of Sub SB 250? Just what is it going to cost us?
I’m no mathematician, Thankfully, The Ohio Department of Taxation has done my work for me. According information from the department found in SuB SB 250’s fiscal note, we learn that Ohio taxpayers can be soaked (depending on how the credit is spread out) between $6-9 million a year–and possibly up to $11.5 million. To top it off, money from other state projects–including public library funding– would need to be reduced to cover the revenue loss.The department expects these costs to increase annually.
From the fiscal note:
The Tax Expenditure Report, prepared by the Ohio Department of Taxation andsubmitted as a supplement to the Governor’s biennial budget estimates that this taxcredit reduces General Revenue Fund (GRF) revenues by $2 million per year. If theamount of the credit is increased by $8,500 to up to $10,000 per child adopted, the tax expenditure may increase by an amount up to $11.5 million for a given year, but therevenue loss for a given year would potentially be spread over six taxable years. TheGRF revenue loss in FY 2015 would be between $6 million and $9 million.
In addition, the personal income tax is a GRF tax, and the Local GovernmentFund (LGF) and Public Library Fund (PLF) each receive 1.66% of GRF receipts.increasing the nonrefundable tax credit will reduce the LGF and PLF by at least$100,000 in tax years 2014 and 2015 for a combined total of at least $200,000 in both years. The amounts would increase in future years as Ohio taxable income grows.
These dollar amounts may look relaively small, but since 2010, most if not all Ohio state agencies have take substantial budget hits. Agencies/departments have been cut or totally defunded, benefits and services cut, and staff laid off. Social services have been hit harrd by the Republican Kasich administration for both economic and political reasons. Funds have been shifted into :faith-based” services and private businesss. Ironically, the state’s Putative Father Registry, which sponsors of this current bill, praise, (as they reduce its already low rate of use) has gone virtually unadvertised except for a webpage,since 1996 due to lack of state funds to promote it.
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Of course none of this matters to Ohio Right to Life and its industrial partners in crime who think that taxpayers owe them something.since they’re on God’s side.
We still haven’t heard why ORTL is so obsessed with newborn adoption since none of this “streamlining” has anything to do with their production. Tax credits don’t put new baybees in the market. No woman is going to forgo abortion so some stranger can get a tax credit. No one needs to be encouraged to adopt newborns. If ORTL really wanted to help women and babies, they could actually lobby for that family preservation tax credit that will never go anywhere. If they really cared about adoption, they’d be lobbying for adoption of older children.
Instead they’re begging for tax payer money for further their own agenda.
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