In a recent paper, we showed that any revenue-neutral tax reform that included Governor Romney’s specific tax cuts and that met his stated goal of not raising taxes on saving and investment would cut taxes for households with income above $200,000 and would therefore necessarily have to raise taxes on taxpayers below $200,000. This was [...]

As politicians and their allies look for ways to finance tax rate cuts, a surprising option is getting a great deal of attention among conservatives: The tax exemption for municipal bonds. Mitt Romney’s economic adviser Glenn Hubbard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Matt Jensen are among those who in recent weeks [...]

Tax Policy Center’s analysis of Governor Romney’s tax plan has elicited much comment and misinterpretation. In a new paper, Sam Brown, Bill Gale, and Adam Looney clarify what the original paper did and did not say by addressing in a Q and A format some of the questions that have been raised. The authors reemphasize [...]

Paul Ryan is often identified as a deficit hawk. And while he regularly talks about the importance of balanced budgets, that’s not what matters most to the GOP’s soon-to-be vice presidential nominee. Ryan’s holy grail is low taxes and small government, not fiscal balance. Those priorities are clear in the fiscal plan Ryan wrote for the [...]

Already, the Romney campaign insists that voters should pay no attention to Paul Ryan’s fiscal agenda.  It is the Romney-Ryan tax and budget plan, they say, not the Ryan-Romney plan. Good luck with that. Both Democrats and conservative Republicans will spend the next three months arguing otherwise. And like them or not, Ryan’s more comprehensive—and [...]

In the recent contretemps over Mitt Romney’s tax plan, some Romney partisans have asserted that the Massachusetts governor’s revenue plank mimics the tax elements of the deficit reduction plan proposed in 2010 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the chairs of President Obama’s deficit fiscal commission. This claim is absurd. These two proposals could hardly be [...]

A new paper by Brookings Institution scholars and Tax Policy Center colleagues Bill Gale, Adam Looney, and Samuel Brown is generating lots of media buzz. Even Barack Obama has put his spin on it with a campaign ad that says if you are middle class, Mitt Romney wants to raise your taxes by up to $2,000 even as he [...]

It won’t be impossible for pay for substantial individual tax rate reductions by cutting tax expenditures. But it will be very, very hard. The challenges are political, administrative, economic, and, in a key way, mathematical. While “broadening the base and lowering the rates” is a goal often advanced by politicians and economists, a new study [...]

Yesterday, Mitt Romney laid out what his campaign said was his vision for health reform. Today, he followed that up with a talk on economic policy. And President Obama delivered a speech that his campaign promoted as a framework for economic policy. Sadly, while men both included plenty of criticism of the other guy, neither told [...]

Over the past week or so, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Glenn Hubbard have all made the same suggestion: Congress should extend all of the 2001/2003 tax cuts, due to expire at year’s end, into early next year. It seems like an awful idea. I suspect they have different motivations for this advice. Clinton, ever [...]