Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan would result in a massive tax cut for nearly all of the highest earning Americans and a steep average tax hike for everyone else, according to a new Tax Policy Center analysis. As Cain knows, when you are in the fast-food pizza business marketing is everything.  Your white cheese, pureed [...]

In another one of those bad ideas that never seem to go away, Congress may be about to grant a huge tax break to multinational companies that have stashed earnings in their foreign subsidiaries. A temporary tax holiday for firms that return those profits to the United States is the latest evidence that bipartisanship is [...]

In a shouting match with a demonstrator at the Iowa State Fair yesterday, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney argued against raising corporate taxes, asserting that “Corporations are people.” He’s right, of course, in both the legal sense—the law treats corporations as if they are people—and in the economic sense—what happens to corporations affects people. Corporations [...]

President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on corporate jets is the Democratic version of “waste, fraud and abuse”—a political attack on a target of opportunity that has little significance in the real world. Just as pols have long implied that reducing government waste or cutting foreign aid can result in big budget savings, so now the White [...]

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” William Shakespeare If I understand correctly, Congressional Republicans will not support job killing tax increases of any kind as part of a plan to reduce the federal deficit. They may, however, support non-job killing revenue raisers. Newspapers [...]

In Washington, bad ideas never go away. Now two old tax breaks have resurfaced with the ostensible goal of creating jobs, despite plenty of evidence that neither actually works. One would create a payroll tax break (aimed at employers instead of workers this time). The other would grant a temporary tax holiday to multinational corporations that [...]

This morning, a panel of veteran international tax experts tried to put the U.S. struggle to fix its corporate tax system in broader perspective. Unfortunately, they concluded that the U.S. is lagging well behind the rest of the world in corporate reform and, worse, the odds of any serious progress anytime soon are slim. The [...]

While there seems to be growing agreement in Washington that the U.S. needs to cut its tax rate on corporations, there is (surprise) no consensus at all on how to pay for this. One way: Raise taxes on capital gains and dividends.    This idea was one element of the broad tax reforms proposed last year by the chairs of [...]

“The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit.”                                             Grover Norquist You’ve got to give Grover credit. Unlike most everyone else in Washington, at least he says what he believes. In a remarkably candid interview with Ezra Klein at The Washington Post, the head of the [...]

To the Obama Administration, tax reform means corporate tax restructuring. Both the president and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have argued that at least the first tranche of reform would scale back tax preferences, cut corporate rates, and, in all, raise the same money that the tax code does today.  In Obama’s vision, redesign of the individual tax [...]