E-mail Newsletter
Enter your e-mail address to receive periodic updates on TPC publications and events.
 newsletter archive
|
Publications By Author
Author: Toder, Eric
Analysis of Specific Tax Provisions in President Obama's FY2014 Budget (Research Report)
Benjamin H. Harris , Jim Nunns , Kim Rueben , Eric Toder , Roberton Williams
This document reviews several notable tax proposals in President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 Budget. These include a 28 percent limit on certain tax expenditures, a cap on tax preferences for retirement savers with high balances, a minimum tax ("Buffett Rule") on high-income taxpayers, alternative incentives for infrastructure investment, and a new measure of inflation ("chained CPI") for indexing tax parameters.
Published: 05/08/13
Availability:
PDF
Options to Reform the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction (Testimony)
Eric Toder
Eric Toder's testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Ways and Means in a hearing on tax reform and residential real estate.
Published: 04/25/13
Availability:
PDF
How Would Reforming the Mortgage Interest Deduction Affect the Housing Market? (Research Brief)
Margery Austin Turner , Eric Toder , Rolf Pendall , Claudia Ayanna Sharygin
Opponents of MID reform warn that reducing the deduction would undermine the value of owner-occupied homes and impede the recovery of the depressed housing market. The best available evidence predicts far less dire effects and suggests that some reforms could actually bolster the housing market recovery. However, the results are far from definitive. As debate continues, the Urban Institute plans to further explore behavioral and market changes, strengthening the evidence upon which policymakers can rely.
Published: 03/26/13
Availability:
PDF
Options to Reform the Deduction for Home Mortgage Interest (Research Report)
Amanda Eng , Harvey Galper , Georgia Ivsin , Eric Toder
Taxpayers can currently deduct interest on up to $1 million in acquisition debt used to buy, build, or improve their personal residences and interest on up to another $100,000 of home equity loans. This brief estimates the effects on revenue and the distribution of the tax burden of proposals that would replace the current mortgage interest deduction with a non-refundable interest credit of either 15 or 20 percent of interest and reduce the ceiling on the amount of all eligible mortgage debt to $500,000. We also estimate the revenue effect of phasing in the proposals over five years.
Published: 03/18/13
Availability:
PDF
Carbon Taxes and Corporate Tax Reform (Research Report)
Donald Marron , Eric Toder
The revenues from a carbon tax could help finance lower corporate tax rates, extending business tax preferences, or other corporate tax reforms. Such a tax swap would reduce the environmental risks of carbon emissions and improve the efficiency of America’s corporate tax system. But it would also pose a significant distributional challenge. A carbon tax would fall disproportionately on low-income families, while corporate tax cuts would disproportionately benefit those with high incomes. Policymakers may want to use some revenue to offset those impacts. They may also want to use some carbon revenues for deficit reduction.
Published: 02/11/13
Availability:
PDF
Toppling Off the Fiscal Cliff: Whose Taxes Rise and How Much? (Research Report)
Roberton Williams , Eric Toder , Donald Marron , Hang Nguyen
The looming fiscal cliff threatens to boost taxes by more than $500 billion in 2013 when many temporary tax provisions are scheduled to expire. Nearly 90 percent of Americans would pay more tax, primarily because the temporary cut in Social Security taxes and many of the 2001/2003 tax cuts would expire. Low-income households would pay more due to expiration of tax credits in the 2009 stimulus. High-income households would be hit hard by higher tax rates on ordinary income, capital gains, and dividends and by the new health reform taxes. And marginal tax rates would rise, potentially affecting economic decisions.
Published: 10/01/12
Availability:
PDF
International Competitiveness: Who Competes Against Whom and for What? (Research Report)
Eric Toder
Political leaders and commentators frequently claim that the policies they favor will make the United States more competitive, without defining what competiveness between countries means. This paper defines competitiveness as a contest between nations for scarce and mobile resources and explores how different tax policies may help or hinder efforts to attract high-skilled labor, capital investment, and headquarters of multinational corporations. While these inputs contribute to living standards, elevating competition for them into a final goal of policy instead of a consideration that must be weighed against costs of tax policies that attract them could lead to seriously flawed policies.
Published: 09/19/12
Availability:
PDF
How Hard Is It to Cut Tax Preferences to Pay for Lower Tax Rates? (Research Report)
Hang Nguyen , Jim Nunns , Eric Toder , Roberton Williams
Some political leaders have proposed to lower individual income tax rates and make up the lost revenue by eliminating tax preferences. To help inform the discussion of such proposals, we examine illustrative revenue-neutral combinations of lower rates and cuts in tax preferences and their effects on the distribution of tax burdens. We conclude that paying for lower rates would require substantial reductions in broadly-used and popular preferences. In addition, requiring that changes maintain the current progressivity of the federal income tax would make it much harder to find a politically acceptable mix of preferences to curtail.
Published: 07/10/12
Availability:
PDF
Changes in Reported Income, 2007-2009 (Article/Tax Facts)
Eric Toder
Adjusted gross income (AGI) reported on individual income tax returns dropped 12 percent between 2007 and 2009, but AGI reported by taxpayers with income of $1 million or more fell by near half. Lower realized capital gains, which are concentrated among the highest income groups, accounted for three-fifths of the drop in AGI. These changes reduced the share of AGI reported by taxpayers with incomes of a $1 million or more from 16.1 percent to 9.5 percent. But the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution has begun to increase again as the stock market has rebounded.
Published: 03/27/12
Availability:
PDF
|
|
by topic