The revenue proposals included in President Obama’s 2014 budget would, as intended, significantly raise taxes on the highest-income American households. However, despite Obama’s long-standing pledge to protect individuals making below $200,000 (and couples making $250,000 or less) from any tax hikes, even many of those families would pay slightly more than under today’s tax law. [...]

The president’s FY 2014 Budget would limit tax benefits for workers with high-balance retirement saving accounts. Although critics call the plan a blow to workers’ retirement saving, I consider the plan a smart way to roll back the billions in tax breaks that go to investors who don’t need tax incentives to save for retirement. [...]

If you’re discussing tax policy with someone who asserts that his or her point is “just common sense,” this could indicate one of two things: Either no deep thought is required—as the person would have you believe. Or no deep thought has been applied. The “common sense” notion that capital income taxes hinder growth seems [...]

In what will probably be the usual endless laundry list of State of the Union promises, President Obama is likely to include tax reform, by which he means a rewrite of the corporate revenue code. The White House seems ready to take a run at lowering corporate rates and scaling back targeted business subsidies. So [...]

If their leaders’ public statements are to be believed, the fiscal chasm between the political parties is widening. And it is hard to see how it can be bridged.    Congressional Democrats and Republicans have agreed to put off the next budget crisis for a month or so. This is a good thing, especially considering [...]

With fiscal cliff talks seemingly stalled (at least today) , there has been growing talk that House Republicans would call President Obama’s bluff and simply pass the Middle-class Tax Cut Act approved by the Senate last summer. But for all the chatter, nobody has paid much attention to what is, and is not, in that bill. [...]

Congress and President Obama can’t agree on much, but they agree on this: Congress must preserve what they persist in calling middle-class tax cuts. As most TaxVox readers know by now, the red lines in this debate are for singles making about $200,000 or less and couples filing jointly making $250,000 or less. By this standard [...]

What would happen if Congress extends the 2001-2010 tax cuts for couples making $500,000 or $1 million-a-year instead of $250,000 or less, as President Obama proposed? According to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Obama could agree to such a deal without adding much more to the deficit than a Senate bill that extends for [...]

President Obama and administration officials have offered two different revenue targets for the fiscal cliff debate: $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion (sometimes reported as $1.5 trillion). You might be wondering (I was) where those numbers come from. The $1 Trillion President Obama wants to extend the majority of the Bush-era individual income tax cuts—enacted in [...]

At his press conference yesterday, President Obama said it is nearly impossible to raise taxes on the wealthy (a key piece of his fiscal strategy) without increasing their tax rates. It is, Obama said, a matter of simple arithmetic.   But a look at some very rough numbers suggests that if the president and congressional [...]