While policy makers and news headlines focus on debates about health care and tax policy, the U.S. fiscal outlook remains troubling and is a constraint against which new proposals should be judged. Budget deficits appear manageable in the short run, but the nation’s debt-GDP ratio is already...

This paper examines, individually and jointly, an excise tax on carbon and an expansion of EITC benefits to childless workers. We estimate how an illustrative tax of $32 per ton of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion would burden households differentially across the income distribution, how it could...

This paper presents estimates of the macroeconomic effects, and resulting dynamic impact on revenues, of the House GOP tax plan announced in June 2016. The estimates were produced in two ways. One set of estimates uses a combination of TPC’s Keynesian model (to project short-run effects on...

Differences in state taxes paid and benefits received for immigrants and native-born Americans are driven by differences in demographic characteristics. Spending on immigrants is somewhat greater primarily because they have more school age children. Fiscal impacts also vary by state. This brief...

A tax deduction intended to encourage conservation of environmentally important land and historic buildings has become a lucrative way for real estate developers to finance development projects—cheating the government out of billions of dollars of revenue and in some cases doing little to...

Income volatility may complicate tax filing and predicting eligibility for critical tax benefits, such as the earned income tax credit. Half of all working-age adults¬—and 64 percent of low-income, working-age adults—have household income that for at least one month of the year will spike above...

States invest in three areas to encourage job and wage growth: the marketplace, the workforce, and the community. Marketplace investment includes general business support and finance assistance, small-business procurement programs, and tax incentives. Workforce programs develop and train the...

This research report was originally published by the Columbia Journal of Tax Law. The publication is updated version of, "An Analysis of the...

States vary in how much governments collect in revenue and spend on goods and services. To understand the sources of these differences, we examined what states could raise (revenue capacity) and would spend (expenditure need) if they followed national averages, taking into account their own...