On Friday, congressional Democrats released the results of a new analysis of base-broadening, rate-cutting tax reform by the Joint Committee on Taxation. For reformers everywhere the results seemed exceedingly grim: By eliminating all deductions, Congress could reduce tax rates by only a puny 4 percent without adding to the deficit. The top tax rate, for instance, [...]

Let’s say you are truly offended that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay income tax. Just complaining won’t fix the problem. All those freeloaders are still out there, dodging their responsibilities as red-blooded taxpaying Americans. So, let’s stop fooling around and do something about it. Here is my modest proposal. Five solutions to make sure everyone pays [...]

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 [...]

About that 47 percent: Let me introduce you to Andrea. When I met her a couple of years ago, she was a home health aide who typically worked six days-a-week and often put in 50 hours. She loved her work, but it is not something most of us would want to do. According to the [...]

The percentage of Americans who don’t pay income tax is making headlines again. However, the story hasn’t changed since I blogged about it last year and my TPC colleagues and I analyzed why in a longer paper. In 2011, 46 percent of tax units paid no federal income tax. Half of them had no taxable [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Politicians and pundits constantly debate the size of government. Is it big or small? Growing or shrinking? You might hope these simple questions have simple answers. But they don’t. Measuring government size is not as easy as it sounds. For example, official statistics track two different measures of government spending. And those measures tell different [...]

Higher education is a good investment, even though some new grads currently struggling to get jobs don’t think so. But does it make sense for the federal government to subsidize college with both tax incentives and direct grants? And if it doesn’t, which program should it dump? There is a strong case that the government [...]