Weird Tax Fact of the Day: The fiscal cliff deal (aka the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012) created what may be the world’s tiniest tax bracket. Under the new law, singles face a rate of 35 percent if their taxable income falls between $398,350 and $400,000. The bracket covers a grand total of $1,650. [...]

In the end, it looks like Congress isn’t even going to kick the fiscal can down the road. Assuming the House passes the deal agreed to by the Senate on New Year’s Eve, lawmakers will barely get that battered tin container it off the front stoop. The agreement preserves nearly all of the 2001-2010 tax [...]

Somehow, the fiscal cliff tax debate has taken a truly weird turn. No, not the politics, which long ago became a parody of Washington deal-making at its worst. It is the policy that has gotten strange: Democrats and Republicans seem hell-bent on protecting millions of high-income people from deficit-cutting tax hikes. President Obama started all [...]

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. [...]

In the recent contretemps over Mitt Romney’s tax plan, some Romney partisans have asserted that the Massachusetts governor’s revenue plank mimics the tax elements of the deficit reduction plan proposed in 2010 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the chairs of President Obama’s deficit fiscal commission. This claim is absurd. These two proposals could hardly be [...]

A new paper by Brookings Institution scholars and Tax Policy Center colleagues Bill Gale, Adam Looney, and Samuel Brown is generating lots of media buzz. Even Barack Obama has put his spin on it with a campaign ad that says if you are middle class, Mitt Romney wants to raise your taxes by up to $2,000 even as he [...]

When Mitt Romney talks about his plan for tax reform, he is very careful to say two things: He wants to cut tax rates, and he wants high-income households to pay the same share of taxes they do today. He said it again on Face the Nation last Sunday—a rare in-depth broadcast interview on a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]