Mitt Romney has proposed massive new tax cuts and promised to balance the federal budget. How will he achieve these seemingly contradictory goals? For now, he isn’t saying. And, in fact, his campaign has been sending out vague and somewhat conflicting signals about where the money would come from to finance his rate cuts and [...]

If you are interested in a serious but accessible look at my favorite topic—tax reform—check out two new books. One, The Benefit and the Burden  Tax Reform: Why We Need It and What It Will Take by Bruce Bartlett, focuses on individual reform. The second, Corporate Tax Reform: Taxing Profits in the 21st Century by Martin [...]

The Tax Policy Center has updated its analysis of Mitt Romney’s platform to reflect his proposed new tax cuts. And the result: Lower taxes for nearly everyone. The highest-income households would pay significantly less, while few with the lowest incomes would benefit.  And without offsetting revenue increases or new spending cuts, Romney’s plan would significantly [...]

Last week, Mitt Romney proposed a new tax plan that would, among other things, reduce individual tax rates by 20 percent across the board and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. To get a rough sense of what those two tax cuts would cost, the Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers. The result: They would be [...]

Republican Presidential candidates say–all the time–that they hate budget deficits. A linchpin of each of their campaigns is a promise to slash government and eliminate the deficit and the national debt. So which one of them would accomplish this ambitious goal? According to a new analysis from the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, [...]

Mitt Romney has added a new plank to his campaign tax platform: Cut all ordinary tax rates by a fifth. That would bring the top individual income tax rate down to 28 percent and cut federal revenue by perhaps $200 billion a year. Romney says that a combination of economic growth and base broadening would [...]

The Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012 (PFSA) – Congress’ first crack at legislating the Buffett rule – would apply a broad-based 30 percent minimum tax for those earning more than $1 million a year. We have a pretty good idea of how this would affect people’s taxes: it would substantially raise them but [...]

We’ve all seen the articles in Forbes, Kiplingers, or U.S. News trumpeting the best states to live in retirement. A key measure for them all: Low taxes. What you may not know is that states actively compete with one another to provide tax breaks to older residents—especially to wealthy seniors. This competiton is similar to the way [...]

What would fundamental changes in the federal tax code mean for state and local governments? Would it limit their ability to raise or borrow money? Would it make their revenue systems more or less progressive or even work more smoothly? Last Friday, I participated in a joint Tax Policy Center and UCLA Law School conference [...]

A well-designed Value-Added Tax could simplify the tax code for most households and finance significant reductions in corporate and individual income tax rates without adding to the budget deficit. And it could be a key piece of a revenue system that is both progressive and less intrusive in economic decisions than today’s law. That’s the [...]