To help analysts craft next year’s state budgets, and to help reporters explain them and the public understand them, we compiled the Urban Institute’s and the Tax Policy Center’s best state-focused research in one place. The research in this compendium will help analysts better evaluate agency...

Families with young children tend to have lower incomes than other families. The current child tax credit provides substantial benefits to families with children, but the maximum benefit of $1,000 is the same for all children under 17, regardless of age. We analyze a proposal that would provide...

In this exercise, TPC estimates the revenue and distributional effects of proposals that would eliminate income tax expenditures to finance lower individual and corporate tax rates and reduce the federal budget deficit.

This paper provides results for three proposals: (1) eliminate...

The Tax Policy Center (TPC) prepared revenue and distributional estimates of a proposal to replace the current tax benefits for defined contribution (DC) qualified retirement plans with a new Guaranteed Retirement Account (GRA). TPC estimates that the proposal would reduce federal income and...

The Trump administration has announced the broad outlines of a tax reform plan that contains many provisions similar to those in the House GOP tax reform “blueprint” announced last year, but there are fundamental differences in the provisions affecting businesses and investors. While different,...

Tax cuts often look like “free lunches” for taxpayers, but they eventually have to be paid for with other tax increases or spending cuts.  We examine the distributional effects – with and without financing – of a tax plan consistent with the outline the Trump Administration produced in April. ...

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...