Ever since the 2008 presidential campaign, President Obama has argued passionately for extending the Bush-era tax cuts for all but the richest 2 percent of Americans. His reasoning: the rich have fared spectacularly well over the past quarter century—incomes of the top 1 percent tripled in real terms—while incomes grew slowly or not at all [...]

On the defensive for cutting a $700 billion tax deal with Republicans, President Obama argued that the agreement is important because it would benefit middle-class Americans. The Tax Policy Center’s preliminary analysis of the plan finds that he’s right—though the proposal would help just about everyone else as well, including the nation’s highest-earners. How much [...]

The tax deal reached by President Obama and congressional Republicans (but not Hill Democrats) includes a bit of good, some bad, and some really ugly. To summarize, this package would make nearly the entire individual revenue code permanently temporary, which is horrible tax policy. It gives the lie to the pious talk about deficit reduction [...]

As usual in December, personal finance columns are filled with end-of-year tax advice—all those things you should do before New Year’s to cut your tax bill. But 2010’s end-of-year issues are different: This year, it’s Congress and the president who need to act fast on a long list of tax policies. Everyone knows about the [...]

My TPC colleague Howard Gleckman wrote the other day about the confusion caused by the multiple baselines advocates use to measure the effects of tax proposals. But baselines don’t really matter. What’s important is not where we start or how things change but where we end up. Baselines are largely political. Partisans use whichever version [...]

The chairs of President Obama’s fiscal commission have refined—in some key ways—their broad-based tax reform plan. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson didn’t change their basic framework from what they unveiled last month. However, the plan they released this morning—due to be voted on by panel members on Friday– is both more specific and more realistic [...]

How can it be that one commentator can blast the tax reform plan proposed a few weeks by the co-chairs of President Obama’s fiscal commission as a tax cut for the rich while another, looking at exactly the same proposal, sees it as a tax increase? It’s all about budget baselines. There is nothing more [...]

Liberal critics of the deficit reduction and tax reform plans that surfaced over the past couple of weeks have been blasting them for the sin of cutting tax rates for the rich at the same time they’d slash spending for the rest of us. I understand why the left would object to cuts in government [...]

The debt reduction and tax reform plan proposed this week by the Bipartisan Policy Center does more than cut the deficit. The task force, chaired by former GOP Senate Budget Committee Chair Pete Domenici and former top congressional and White House budget official Alice Rivlin, also deals workers who have no kids at home a [...]

On Wednesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center Debt Reduction Task Force—a bipartisan group of former politicians and government officials—released a plan to tame the national debt. There are big, painful cuts to virtually every spending agency as well as a radical reform of the income tax to raise more revenue in a fair, simple, and efficient [...]