Most advanced countries exempt returns to retirement saving from income tax, but private saving rates are falling and many people are saving too little for retirement. There is a trade-off between the goals of promoting wide participation in retirement saving plans and allowing more choice to...

Eugene Steuerle suggests one ripe area for expanded reporting involving capital gains, particularly from mutual funds and brokerage houses. The IRS could match net gains from information reports with what taxpayers report on their returns, taxpayers would not be faced with multiple choices, they...

A variety of recent studies have found that the United States faces a substantial fiscal gap -- that is, a sizable imbalance between projected federal outlays and receipts. A recent study by Boskin (2003) suggests these findings are overstated because they largely or entirely omit projected...

Federal and state income taxes play an important role in providing income support for low-income households by administering refundable tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC). Using the Urban Institute’s Net Income Change Calculator (NICC), which provides state- and federal-...

The White House announced a package of tax proposals as part of what President Obama called “Middle Class Economics” in the State of the Union Address. This paper summarizes and discusses TPC’s distributional estimates, focusing on the distribution of all income tax cuts, the major tax cut...

This Tax Fact explores the child tax credits refundability thresholds since its inception. Currently, the CTC is a $1,000-per-child credit that is partially refundable for households earning more than $3,000. This Tax Fact explores the distribution of credits when the refundability threshold...

This paper describes the major provisions in the Tax Reform Act of 2014, the comprehensive tax reform plan released on February 26, 2014, by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI). It also presents the Tax Policy Centers analysis of the plans revenue impact beyond the 10-year budget...

On February 28, 2014, the Urban Institute hosted an invitational conference on what policymakers in the United States can learn from the experience of other countries with territorial systems for taxing the income of their multinational corporations. Participants included academic experts,...

Including employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) in taxable compensation would increase income and payroll tax receipts, but would also increase Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) benefits by adding ESI to the OASDI earnings base. The increased present value of OASDI...

This paper provides an historical overview of tax reform with an eye toward identifying conditions that would make successful reform plausible in the near future. Burman begins by analyzing the environment that led to tax reform in 1986 and posits that successful reform would require strong...