Critics of the Buffett Rule often argue that the idea is hardly worth the trouble since it would raise taxes on less than a tenth of one percent of Americans and generate less than $5 billion a year. With annual deficits projected at 100 times that amount over the next decade, the additional revenue is [...]

A House panel today began what could be the beginning of a remarkable exercise: It is reviewing the merits of dozens of expiring tax provisions that litter the Revenue Code. I hesitate to say so, but this could be a case of Congress doing its actual job.   By the Joint Committee on Taxation’s count, [...]

By now, many readers of TaxVox know how much Barack Obama and Mitt Romney pay in taxes. But true tax wonks are more interested in why the candidates paid what they paid. A new infographic from the Tax Policy Center tells that story. The interactive display of the president’s and Romney’s (preliminary) 2011 tax returns [...]

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, [...]

The tax code is chock full of credits, deductions, deferrals, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential rates. Taken together, such tax preferences will total almost $1.3 trillion this year. That’s a lot of money. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that $1.3 trillion is there for the picking in any upcoming deficit reduction or tax reform.  In fact, [...]

There is more to the Affordable Care Act than the individual mandate. There are also, for example, taxes. And since this is TaxVox, I thought it would be useful to think about some of those revenue provisions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s three-day hearing on the fate of the ACA. The law includes [...]

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 [...]

Mitt Romney has added a new plank to his campaign tax platform: Cut all ordinary tax rates by a fifth. That would bring the top individual income tax rate down to 28 percent and cut federal revenue by perhaps $200 billion a year. Romney says that a combination of economic growth and base broadening would [...]

The Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012 (PFSA) – Congress’ first crack at legislating the Buffett rule – would apply a broad-based 30 percent minimum tax for those earning more than $1 million a year. We have a pretty good idea of how this would affect people’s taxes: it would substantially raise them but [...]

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 [...]