With the U.S. facing huge domestic policy challenges, one might have hoped for a serious debate on fiscal issues between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. One would have been deeply disappointed. Rather than framing what seem to be profoundly different views of government, the candidates chose to double-down on what Bill Clinton memorably called the [...]

With the presidential campaign finally reaching a soggy finish, TaxVox is taking a final pre-election look at the tax policies of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Last week, we described Obama’s tax policy platform. Here is a rundown of Mitt Romney’s tax agenda. The elevator speech: Romney favors multiple tax cuts for individuals and would reduce [...]

When it comes to taxes, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are almost perfect mirror images of one another. Here are ten ways their tax plans are different. Romney’s tax agenda is ambitious and opaque. Obama’s is modest but relatively transparent. Obama has shown little interest in broad-based tax reform. Romney wants to fundamentally rewrite the [...]

The Tax Policy Center’s new tables showing the revenue and distributional effects of capping itemized deductions have received a great deal of attention since we released them on Tuesday. Our results show that capping deductions can raise a large amount of revenue in a quite progressive manner. Capping deductions could thus be an important component [...]

You’ve probably heard claims that Mitt Romney wants to cut taxes by $5 trillion. Here are five things you should know about that figure: 1. $5 trillion is the gross amount of tax cuts he has proposed, not the net impact of all his intended tax reforms. Governor Romney has been very specific about the [...]

President Obama says Governor Romney will cut taxes for high-income households by $250,000. Romney counters that under his plan, the rich will pay the same share of taxes they do today. Who’s right? It all depends on what plan you are looking at and what you are measuring. The first problem is the two candidates [...]

The breathlessly-hyped debate between President Obama and Governor Romney left me with an empty feeling. There were many words–oh, there were words– but even the most casual observer of the campaign has heard most of them before. Yet when it comes to economic policy,  I learned almost nothing new about how either Romney or Obama would govern over the next [...]

Yesterday, Kevin Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute economist and informal adviser to Mitt Romney, insisted that Romney would not raise taxes on low- and middle-income households in order to finance his promised 20 percent across-the-board rate cut. Nor would those rate cuts increase the deficit. Instead, Kevin predicted that if Congress did not trim tax [...]

If only Mitt Romney had paid attention to Ronald Reagan. There are so many things the former Massachusetts governor could learn from the former California governor’s presidential campaigns. But I have in mind only one lesson not learned—how Reagan ran on tax reform in 1984. Reagan only cautiously embraced the idea of rewriting the tax [...]

Yes, political conventions are costly anachronisms. But, with patience and time, one can learn quite a lot about a political party by watching, or reading, what the confab produces. Thus, a few thoughts about the GOP and fiscal policy as Republicans decamp from Tampa: Mitt Romney: In last night’s acceptance speech, he sketched out his [...]