Firms can legally sell medical marijuana in 19 states and the District of Columbia and recreational weed in two. They must pay federal income taxes, but unlike all other businesses they are prohibited from reducing their taxable income by deducting business expenses. It is, to say the least, an odd state of affairs. Almost all [...]

The Congressional Budget Office report on the distribution of tax expenditures is getting lots of buzz, nearly all of it positive. This is a gratifying and somewhat surprising outcome. The paper confirms many of the findings of my Tax Policy Center colleagues who have done similar analyses in recent years. The basic story is pretty [...]

Two interesting new papers from the Congressional Research Service highlight a major challenge faced by any tax reform that reduces itemized deductions to help pay for lower tax rates—lots of middle-income people would lose at least some benefits from scaling back those deductions. It isn’t a new lesson, but it is one that bears repeating. For instance, [...]

Last week, at the request of the House Ways and Means Committee, I testified on how Congress could reform the mortgage interest deduction, a popular tax expenditure provision with a big sticker price. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the mortgage interest deduction will cost $380 billion over the next five years, making it [...]

It has become conventional wisdom in Washington that the just-announced retirement of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) boosts chances for tax reform in the short term. I’m not so sure. The upbeat argument goes like this: By announcing that he will not run for reelection in 2014, Baucus is free from the pressures of [...]

Every year at tax time I am reminded of two tax benefits that subsidize my children’s child care – the employer-provided child care exclusion and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). Families with sufficient expenses can benefit from both provisions. Congress could simplify these child care benefits by harmonizing the maximum allowable expenses for [...]

President Obama’s budget identifies a group of policies as a $1.8 trillion deficit reduction proposal. I found the budget presentation of this proposal somewhat confusing; in particular, it is difficult to see how much deficit reduction the president wants to do through spending cuts versus revenue increases. After some digging into the weeds, I pulled [...]

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. [...]

From the start of his 2008 campaign, President Obama has called for raising taxes on the rich. He got much but not all that he wanted in the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) earlier this year. Now his FY2014 budget takes another couple of bites at that apple. The first repeats his proposal to cap [...]

It is an article of faith at the White House and among some congressional Republicans that while individual tax reform may be off the table this year, corporate reform remains a reachable goal. Rewriting the corporate income tax, goes the theory, is easier because there is a consensus within the business community to lower rates [...]