On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on “Extenders and Tax Reform: Seeking Long-Term Solutions.”  It’s about time!  The charade of annual or biennial debate about perpetually “expiring” tax provisions is terrible tax policy and a symbol of our failure to come to terms with budget reality. If you need help sleeping, download the Joint [...]

With congressional deficit reduction efforts largely collapsed, the question remains: What are we going to do about the nation’s long-term budget mess? Since any realistic deficit reduction plan will require significant new revenues, is a Value-Added Tax a sensible way for government to raise those extra dollars? In an effort to find out, the Pew [...]

In just a few years, the 2010 health reform law will begin providing subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people buy health insurance. And that assistance is supposed to be delivered through tax credits—with payments going directly from the IRS to insurance companies.  But will those credits actually work? Maybe, but it won’t be easy. [...]

My latest column for the Christian Science Monitor: Tax reform has emerged as a key issue for GOP presidential hopefuls. Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants to scrap our current system and replace it with a 20 percent flat tax on individual and corporate incomes. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wants to do the [...]

In the back-and-forth over deficit reduction on Capitol Hill, Republicans have floated the idea of cutting individual tax rates by 20 percent across the board. There is much more to their plan: Crucially, they’d also trim tax subsidies. However, they don’t say how, so my colleagues at the Tax Policy Center looked only at what [...]

I’ve been reviewing the tax plans of the major Republican presidential hopefuls and am struck at how conventional Mitt Romney’s is.  While Herman Cain wants to replace the entire federal tax code with his 9-9-9 consumption tax and Rick Perry favors a massive tax cut, Romney would do little more than tinker around the edges of the current [...]

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan would result in a massive tax cut for nearly all of the highest earning Americans and a steep average tax hike for everyone else, according to a new Tax Policy Center analysis. As Cain knows, when you are in the fast-food pizza business marketing is everything.  Your white cheese, pureed [...]

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s plan to fund a $445 billion stimulus, err, jobs bill with a 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires is not all bad. After all, Tax the Rich does make a nice campaign bumper-sticker. But it is mostly bad. Why? Here are five reasons. The idea, endorsed today by President Obama, would [...]

Conservatives like to say that President Obama has been responsible for massive tax increases.  It is wonderful rhetoric that plays to the big tax image Democrats have been saddled with for decades—sometimes with good reason. But for most households, this claim is the economic equivalent of the birther movement: It is as credible to call [...]

PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson recently pointed me to a blog post by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor complaining that President Obama’s proposal to limit itemized deductions would hurt soup kitchens—and their poor clients—by inducing rich people to give less to charities. That may be true, but Cantor’s own ideas about cutting taxes would do the same [...]