Month: October 2010

October 26, 2010 08:17 AM | Permalink |

Tax reform is important and desirable, but too often short-lived. Absent action to address the biases in favor of tax expenditures, lawmakers have almost no chance of maintaining a reformed tax code for long, nor do they have much chance of being able to impartially decide whether new government programs should be implemented as tax expenditures or direct expenditures. Procedural reforms of the type outlined in this report should be the starting point for reining in lawmakers’ unhealthy obsession with tax expenditures.

Note: This report was written for State Tax Notes, and therefore takes a state-level perspective.  It is, however, equally applicable to the situation at the federal level.

Read the report.

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October 22, 2010 03:13 PM | Permalink |

On Sunday, October 10, Harvard professor Greg Mankiw wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that if taxes go up, he’ll work less. We take exception to both Mankiw’s calculations and his theory of how taxes affect behavior.

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October 20, 2010 02:18 PM | Permalink |

New data from the IRS show that only 0.6 percent of deaths in the U.S. in 2008 resulted in estate tax liability. The estate tax that would exist under President Obama’s tax plan would affect even fewer estates, which demonstrates why Congress should consider enacting a more robust estate tax than what President Obama envisions.

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October 19, 2010 01:33 PM | Permalink |

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), signed into law by President Barack Obama, expanded two refundable tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. While most of the provisions in ARRA are intended to be temporary, President Obama has proposed making permanent these expansions of refundable tax credits for low-income families. These figures show how these expansions would affect taxpayers in different income groups if extended through 2011 and how many families and children would be helped in each state.

Read the report.

 

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