From the start of his 2008 campaign, President Obama has called for raising taxes on the rich. He got much but not all that he wanted in the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) earlier this year. Now his FY2014 budget takes another couple of bites at that apple. The first repeats his proposal to cap [...]

In the alphabet soup of Washington, ATRA fixed the AMT, sort of. In English, the newly enacted American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 will permanently protect millions of taxpayers from having to pay the alternative minimum tax without Congress having to approve a temporary patch every year or so. It even knocks a few hundred [...]

The Tax Policy Center (TPC) has estimated that going over the fiscal cliff will raise taxes on average by about $3,500 per household in tax year 2013, compared with extension of 2011 tax law. But tens of millions of Americans have a much more immediate problem. They’ll face a huge tax increase when they file [...]

In the strange alchemy of Washington, Congress can magically turn a tax increase into a tax cut.  And to make it happen, all it has to do is…nothing.      Yesterday, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) told an audience at the Brookings Institution that she would prefer to let the government tumble over the fiscal cliff at [...]

Yesterday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), who rarely gives public speeches, laid out his agenda for tax reform. Just for fun, I compared what Baucus told the Bipartisan Policy Center to a speech House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) delivered just three weeks ago to a group of Washington lobbyists. [...]

When the president first announced his Buffett Rule–that millionaires should pay at least 30 percent of their income in tax–in the State of the Union address in January, I had a strong sense of déjà vu.  It is another alternative minimum tax, and its provenance is very similar.  Congress created a minimum tax back in [...]

Like many of you, I just finished my 2011 tax return. Counting worksheets, it was 59 pages long. It occurs to me that our current insanely complex tax rules are made possible by technology. Yes, computer software makes filing easier (both for professionals and civilians). But that may be the problem. The relative ease of filing, [...]

Last week, Mitt Romney proposed a new tax plan that would, among other things, reduce individual tax rates by 20 percent across the board and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. To get a rough sense of what those two tax cuts would cost, the Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers. The result: They would be [...]

Amidst the myriad proposals in President Obama’s budget are two “big ideas” that would raise revenue in a progressive manner without raising taxes. These important ideas should be emphasized in the discussion of tax and fiscal reform that the country should be having and will have to have sooner or later.  (The President also proposes [...]

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama’s called for a new law that would require high-income people to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. In response, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Representative Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) have introduced the Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012, a proposal designed to [...]