When it comes to taxes, President Obama has proposed what might best be called a conceptual budget—a powerful call for tax reform that is long on principles but, at least when it comes to individual levies, woefully short on specifics. This is understandable with what is effectively a reelection manifesto. In high campaign season, specifics [...]

Despite evidence to the contrary, there is a lingering view that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would primarily help middle-income households and not favor the rich. Yet TPC’s analysis of the plan clearly showed that high-income households would win big and others would do less well. Poor families would actually lose, relative to the taxes they’re [...]

Ernest Hemingway: I am getting to know the rich. Mary Colum: I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money. It turns out that when it comes to taxes, at least, Ms. Colum, was mostly—but not entirely–right. To see why, let’s take a quick [...]

Mitt Romney’s holdings in the Cayman Islands have generated lots of interest in investment funds that are managed from the U.S. but incorporated in foreign jurisdictions.   But taxable U.S. investors like Romney don’t get much benefit from such funds.  The real winners are U.S. tax-exempt entities, such as charities, pension funds, university endowments, and IRAs, [...]

The on-again, off-again battle over how to tax the compensation of private equity managers may be on again, thanks to the confluence of two seemingly unrelated events. The first is the controversy over the role of Bain Capital, the investment partnership whose founders included Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The second is the disclosure by [...]

A new Tax Policy Center analysis finds that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would cut taxes for millions of households but bestow most of its benefits on those with the highest incomes. At the same time, it would significantly cut corporate taxes and add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. Compared to current law (assuming [...]

I’ve been reviewing the tax plans of the major Republican presidential hopefuls and am struck at how conventional Mitt Romney’s is.  While Herman Cain wants to replace the entire federal tax code with his 9-9-9 consumption tax and Rick Perry favors a massive tax cut, Romney would do little more than tinker around the edges of the current [...]

Welcome to the season of jobs plans. GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman offered his last week. President Obama will propose his before Thursday night’s football game.  But today is GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s day. And at least when it comes to tax policy, he veers a bit to the left of the new Republican orthodoxy.  To be [...]

In a couple of weeks, President Obama will ask Congress to extend this year’s payroll tax cut. It will surely become a classic Washington double-reverse rhetorical moment. I can’t wait to hear Obama lift some of House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) best lines about the folly of raising taxes in the midst of an economic [...]

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 [...]