Tax expenditures for retirement saving top $100 billion annually—from 401(k)-type plans ($61.4 billion) to IRAs ($17.6 billion) to tax preferences...

Most federal subsidies aimed at helping households accumulate financial and tangible assets are delivered through tax expenditures—spending through...

Taxpayer use of itemized deductions varies widely by location, according to a new analysis of 2007 IRS data. In about one in ten counties, 11...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of our nation’s most effective anti-poverty policies, bringing 10.1 million families out of poverty in 2012 ...

In this year’s State of the Union Address, President Obama announced a new retirement savings account for workers whose employers do not offer any form...

Tax expenditures for homeownership, such as deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes and the partial exclusion for capital gains on the sale of a...

Differences in income and other characteristics mean that federal income tax burdens vary substantially across counties. While the median federal income tax burden across counties...

Congress’s latest flirtation with debt-limit default caused barely a ripple in the financial markets. Rates on short-term Treasuries spiked in early October, before quickly subsiding...

When it comes to property taxes, location matters. In a new TPC report , my colleague Brian David Moore and I look at just how...

Tax preferences for housing are under fire, with mounting evidence that these preferences are inefficient , unequal , and too expensive to warrant a place...

Until the Great Recession, state and local governments played a remarkably constant role through down business cycles. For four decades, when the economy turned sour,...

The president’s FY 2014 Budget would limit tax benefits for workers with high-balance retirement saving accounts. Although critics call the plan a blow to workers’...

Finland’s government recently announced a broad fiscal reform package that cuts corporate tax rates—financed in part by higher taxes on corporate dividends. The plan makes...

Automatic enrollment is slowly gaining steam as the choice strategy to encourage retirement saving. A bold plan in California would eventually make the practice widespread...

In two weeks, about $1 trillion in automatic spending cuts will begin to kick in, a testament to the inability of policymakers to reach a...

The American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) , the New Year’s legislation that effectively forestalled the bulk of the January 2013 fiscal cliff, probably staved off...

Economic growth estimates released yesterday were not good news : the economy contracted in the fourth quarter for the first time since 2009, albeit by...

Last week Japan announced a massive stimulus package designed to jumpstart its slumping economy, which is in the midst of its fifth recession in 15...

Last week Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal proposed replacing the state’s individual income and corporate taxes with a higher sales tax. While details are scarce,...

By Bill Gale and Ben Harris In Tuesday’s speech at the University of Chicago, former Minnesota Governor and newly announced presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty took...

The combination of the recently-passed health care legislation and the President’s proposed rollback of the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers would sharply boost tax rates on the wealthy. This is great news for the high-end real estate market. It may seem counterintuitive, but raising taxes on those in the top brackets could increase urban house prices by as much as 10 percent, and even more in east and west coast cities where homes are most expensive. The drivers of this windfall: higher top rates on ordinary income and hikes in capital gains taxes. Obama’s proposal to limit the benefit of itemized deductions to 28 percent could more than reverse this housing windfall, but that measure is unlikely to win congressional approval.

Economists can't seem to agree about whether the corporate tax falls on the rich or the poor. We pretty much concur that sales and payroll taxes are regressive and that income and estate taxes are progressive, but we argue endlessly about whether the burden of the corporate tax falls more on the wealthy or the middle class.

Is America's banker turning bearish? This week, Japan eclipsed China as the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities. This news comes one week after it was reported that China may sell-off some of its U.S. Treasury holdings to punish Washington for selling weapons to Taiwan. These developments offer more evidence that Beijing is growing less willing to continue buying and holding U.S. debt.

Unless Congress acts in the next six months, the estate tax will be repealed in 2010 and then revert to its 2001 parameters — substantially more burdensome than current levels — in 2011. This bizarre policy makes it very likely that Congress will reform the levy by the end of this year, but it’s unclear exactly how.

Earlier this week the Washington Post published an article painting the Administration’s tax plan as one that would burden small business owners with soaring tax payments. In stark contrast, a Post editorial run just two weeks earlier—“The Small Business Myth”—debunked claims that Obama’s plan unfairly targeted business owners. Which Washington Post piece is right?