These days, some people want to impose a new Buffett tax on millionaires while others are outraged that low income people pay no income taxes at all and still others want to cut taxes on “job creators.” All in the name of fairness. Is the tax code fair? Should it be? It all depends on what [...]

This afternoon, I moderated an interesting Tax Policy Center panel on taxing the rich. With the Senate about to debate a Buffett tax on millionaires, the timing couldn’t be better. Unfortunately for the White House, about the only thing the panelists agreed upon was that the Buffett tax is a terrible idea.   My fellow [...]

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, [...]

When we talk about the federal budget, we usually rely on the government’s official definition of “spending” which is to say the amount of money that’s run through federal agencies. But, in reality, the federal government spends a lot more than that. Using a broader definition of spending, which includes hundreds of billions in dollars [...]

The Tax Policy Center has updated its analysis of Mitt Romney’s platform to reflect his proposed new tax cuts. And the result: Lower taxes for nearly everyone. The highest-income households would pay significantly less, while few with the lowest incomes would benefit.  And without offsetting revenue increases or new spending cuts, Romney’s plan would significantly [...]

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 [...]

On Tuesday, I testified before the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing titled “Extenders and Tax Reform: Seeking Long-Term Solutions.” I was already depressed about the state of our tax system before I started preparing. As I drafted my testimony, I became distraught. Our tax system is a mess and unless we send a clear [...]

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 [...]

For a while there, I thought President Obama was going to embrace tax reform in his State of the Union address.  Instead, following the lead of his predecessors, he offered a laundry list of new tax subsidies, bragged about some old ones, and said almost nothing about a top-to-bottom rewrite of the Tax Code. Here’s just [...]

On Nov. 2, TaxVox reported on a new Joint Committee on Taxation study on whether it is possible to reduce the corporate tax rate to 25 percent by eliminating business tax preferences. In response, we heard from George Callas,  staff director of the Ways & Means Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures, who has a very different view of the study. George has [...]