Iowans for Tax Relief, a Muscatine-based taxpayer watchdog group, has promised an all-out public relations assault on legislators in order to stop them from ending federal deductibility, an exemption that allows residents to write off their federal taxes on state returns.

The idea to end the deduction was included in a tax reform proposal announced Thursday by Democratic legislators.

In their most recent newsletter released Friday, the group called for its members to begin calling and e-mailing legislators on the House Ways and Means Committee, the panel that will discuss the proposed tax bill next week. The group’s president, Ed Failor Jr., told Radio Iowa that there would also be a huge media blitz to oppose the measure, with the group purchasing ads on radio and television around the state.

“We are going to inform our 53,000 members. We’re going to inform folks who aren’t out members. We’re going to do radio. We’re going to do TV. We’re going to do direct mail,” Failor says. “We are going to light up the mailboxes and the phone banks at the statehouse.”

The group, which helped derail a similar proposal in the 1980s when it was pushed by former Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, enjoys huge influence in Iowa’s Republican Party. In 2008 alone, the group donated nearly $290,000 to Republican candidates around the state, including 19 current GOP House members and seven GOP Senators, according to The National Institute on Money in State Politics.

“Repeal of federal deductibility is bad for Iowa,” Failor said in a statement. “Paying a tax on a tax flies in the face of common sense Iowa values and is simply unfair.”

Democrats counter that ending the deductibility will allow for the tax code to be made more progressive, granting tax breaks for middle and lower income Iowans. Iowa State Economist Dave Swenson told the Iowa Independent Thursday that the current system favors the wealthiest taxpayers and those who are able to itemize their deductions. He also called federal deductibility “an archaic holdover from a long ago time that nobody really knows why it exists anymore.”

Iowa, Alabama and Louisiana are the only states that allow federal taxes to be deducted on state returns.

The tax proposal will be discussed in the House Ways and Means Committee Monday at 12:30 p.m.