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 [...]

A wonderfully-titled new paper—The Tragedy of the Carrots—by Boston College law professor Brian Galle got me thinking about Solyndra, the failed solar panel company that has become something of  a poster child for botched industrial policy. By now, you probably know Solyndra’s sad tale. The firm got $537 million in federal loan guarantees from the [...]

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 [...]

Last week I had the opportunity to testify before two Ways and Means subcommittees–Select Revenue Measures and Oversight–about the way our tax system is used as a tool of energy policy. Here are my opening remarks. You can find my full testimony here. As you know, our tax system is desperately in need of reform. It’s needlessly complex, economically [...]

I just came across this bar chart, which illustrates graphically why the tax code is such a mess.  The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) is the official scorekeeper for all tax legislation passed by the Congress.  The chart shows the number of requests for estimates and other analysis that they’ve received from Congressional offices since [...]

After I wrote last week about Warren Buffett’s New York Times op-ed on the low tax rates paid by wealthy investors, Tax Policy Center visiting scholar Brian Galle pointed out that my graph showing the maximum tax rates Americans could pay was misleading. Actual tax rates, he noted, are much lower than what the graph [...]

It has become fashionable (I am happy to say) for  politicians to talk about ending or at least scaling back tax subsidies. But  pols mean very different things when they say this. And new analysis by the Tax  Policy Center shows that whether they help you or not often depends on how much  money you [...]