Suppose someone proposed a special tax on businesses that make their ownership shares publicly available in affordable, easy-to-sell units. Such an idea would probably generate a lot of push-back. Efficiency advocates might complain that it taxed the very attributes that make equity markets efficient. Progressivity advocates might object on the grounds that it taxed those [...]

If 2012 was the year of modest economic recovery and surprising Democratic election success, 2013 may be the year of perpetual fiscal policy crisis. After watching the still-unresolved partisan battle over the fiscal cliff, it is increasingly hard to imagine Congress and President Obama reaching anything like a big budget deal next year. Instead, it [...]

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner may be close to agreeing on a plan that, among other things, would revise the way government programs are adjusted for inflation. Most attention is focused on what this means for Social Security recipients. But the Tax Policy Center estimates that changing the cost-of-living measure would also result [...]

With fiscal cliff talks seemingly stalled (at least today) , there has been growing talk that House Republicans would call President Obama’s bluff and simply pass the Middle-class Tax Cut Act approved by the Senate last summer. But for all the chatter, nobody has paid much attention to what is, and is not, in that bill. [...]

The Tax Policy Center (TPC) has estimated that going over the fiscal cliff will raise taxes on average by about $3,500 per household in tax year 2013, compared with extension of 2011 tax law. But tens of millions of Americans have a much more immediate problem. They’ll face a huge tax increase when they file [...]

If income tax deductions are capped or limited—an idea that often comes up in the debate over both the fiscal cliff and long-run tax reform—the biggest losers could well be charities. At a time when the government role in providing a safety net may shrink, many of these groups may become increasingly important.  Yet deduction [...]

As a lame-duck Congress once again faces an impending deadline for dealing with expiring tax cuts, TPC has released a new Tax Calculator to compare potential outcomes. We obviously don’t know what the outcome of negotiations between Congress and the White House will be but have modeled four possibilities: 2012 tax law (with an AMT [...]

Congress and President Obama can’t agree on much, but they agree on this: Congress must preserve what they persist in calling middle-class tax cuts. As most TaxVox readers know by now, the red lines in this debate are for singles making about $200,000 or less and couples filing jointly making $250,000 or less. By this standard [...]

President Obama and administration officials have offered two different revenue targets for the fiscal cliff debate: $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion (sometimes reported as $1.5 trillion). You might be wondering (I was) where those numbers come from. The $1 Trillion President Obama wants to extend the majority of the Bush-era individual income tax cuts—enacted in [...]

At his press conference yesterday, President Obama said it is nearly impossible to raise taxes on the wealthy (a key piece of his fiscal strategy) without increasing their tax rates. It is, Obama said, a matter of simple arithmetic.   But a look at some very rough numbers suggests that if the president and congressional [...]