Roberton Williams compares the adjusted gross incomes of the top 400 with the incomes of all other taxpayers with income over $1 million and finds that because they realize more capital gains, the top 400 tend to have lower effective income tax rates than other very high-income taxpayers.

This paper takes a broad look at tax expenditures in the context of revenue raising tax reform. It first reviews how tax expenditures have changed over the past 25 years and provides estimates of the distribution of tax savings resulting from tax expenditures today. The paper then examines three...

In a contribution to the New York Times' Room for Debate, Roberton Williams suggests Congress scale back on tax subsidies in a way that protects America's hard-hit middle class.

About 46 percent of American households will pay no federal individual income tax in 2011, roughly half of them because of structural features of the income tax that provide basic exemptions for subsistence level income and for dependents. The other half are nontaxable because tax expenditures...