2013 is a tough year if you owe payroll tax, as most of us do. Not only did the 2010 payroll tax cut die at the end of 2012, but high-income workers now owe an extra 0.9 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Economists worry about what the combined new taxes will mean for [...]

Our new Marriage Bonus and Penalty calculator, despite all its Valentine’s Day finery, ignores the new 0.9 percent Medicare payroll tax hike buried in the 2010 health law. The extra levy affects only a few high-income couples but in very different ways. Lucky couples will collect marriage bonuses of up to $450. But those less [...]

Just as Congress allowed the 2011-12 payroll tax cut to expire, new research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that such tax breaks may significantly boost consumer spending. As a result, raising workers’ take-home pay this way might play a bigger role than many thought in reversing economic slumps. The study by [...]

Following Congress’s last minute passage of legislation averting a plunge off the fiscal cliff, TPC has released a new Tax Calculator that lets users examine the effects of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA). As with earlier versions, the new calculator compares income and payroll tax liabilities under alternative scenarios: ATRA, the tax [...]

How much will you pay in Social Security and Medicare taxes over your lifetime? And how much can you expect to get back in benefits? It depends on whether you’re married, when you retire, and how much you’ve earned over a lifetime. I recently published with Caleb Quakenbush “Social Security and Medicare Taxes and Benefits [...]

Each year when I complete my federal income tax return, Turbotax tells me my average tax rate—how much tax I owe measured as a percentage of my total income. But it would be better if I learned my marginal tax rate or MTR—the percentage tax that I would pay on an additional dollar of income. [...]

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 [...]

I get the impression that many Americans believe Medicare is financed like Social Security. They know that a portion of payroll taxes goes to Social Security and a portion goes to Medicare. So they conclude workers are paying for Medicare benefits the same way they are paying for Social Security benefits. That isn’t remotely true, [...]

State taxes and transfers can be an important form of assistance for low-income families. But the amount of government help varies widely among the states. And, importantly, so does what happens to those benefits when such a family increases its wages. To help understand how those tax and spending programs work, the Urban Institute has [...]

Last week I argued that budgeting for Medicare’s hospital insurance program is flawed. Today, I offer two ways to fix it (and reject a third). Medicare Part A is one of several federal programs that control spending through a “belt and suspenders” combination of regular program rules (the belt) and an overall limit (the suspenders). But [...]