On April 1, 2002, a press release announced, “The Tax Policy Center, a new joint venture between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution” was...

Congress seems to be considering two ways to address the Tax Cut and Job Act’s $10,000 cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction...

Senators Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) recently asked for an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s research activities, including its use of contractors...

Partisan congressional squabbling over the nation’s debt limit once again threatens to shut down the federal government and perhaps trigger a worldwide financial crisis. The...

President Biden has proposed to tax capital gains earned by high-income households more like other income. This is a significant reform that would close loopholes...

Nobody making under 400,000 bucks would have their taxes raised. Period. Bingo. – Joe Biden, May 22, 2020 Enacting good tax policy is hard under...

Capitalism produces a dizzying array of products and, in the process, generates an enormous amount of wealth. But capitalism creates a problem in that the...

With Joe Biden in the White House and narrow control of the Congress, Democrats are likely to try to restore the full state and local...

On September 30, President Trump held a fundraiser in St. Paul MN, an event that received a lot of attention because he participated even after...

In 1970, Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute got a Moog synthesizer —a giant, unwieldy computer that created music. The sound was weird and quite evidently electronic. My...

Back in 1991, Saturday Night Live spoofed politicians who see capital gains tax cuts as a panacea. In one sketch, after being frozen for eons,...

Congress is about to pass a massive economic stimulus package that will, among other things, send cash to most American households. The so-called rebates amount...

Pi Day is one of my favorite holidays, where I have a chance to celebrate math, pies, and puns. All of which I love. This...

On Friday, Elizabeth Warren released her financing plan for Medicare for All . It is predictably wonky and politically courageous—new spending is way more popular...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) cut federal tax revenues by nearly $2 trillion over its first decade, with almost all the benefit going...

A new Tax Policy Center analysis finds that the vast majority of households that paid the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) before the 2017 Tax Cuts...

In a new paper , I propose a universal earned income tax credit (UEITC)—a one-for-one match on the first $10,000 of earnings delivered through a...

Alice Rivlin made the world a better place in so many ways. She will forgive me for ignoring most of them in this brief essay...

In Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital , Kimberly Clausing has written a comprehensive and accessible analysis of three of...

The Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently agreed that OMB would review many tax regulations before they are released, a...

Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) just introduced the ‘‘ Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act ’’ (or Stop-BEZOS) that would punish...

During primary season in 2000, I came upon my boss—a longtime Democratic insider—reading John McCain's tax plan. “It’s really good,” he said, and a lot...

In response to my post attempting to shoot down the Trump Administration’s trial balloon re capital gains indexation, a financial advisor wondered if I might...

The Trump Administration reportedly is thinking about using its executive authority to redefine capital gains so only returns from the sale of assets in excess...

National Economic Council chair Larry Kudlow reportedly wants the IRS to redefine capital gains to include only returns from the sale of assets in excess of inflation. Were it feasible, it would make sense to measure all income and expense in real terms. But indexing capital gains alone by executive fiat would make no sense. It would cut capital gains taxes by up to $20 billion a year for the richest Americans and open the door to a raft of new, inefficient tax shelters. And it would do all this without the approval of Congress.