Recent tax acts sharply lowered tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividend income. For millions of taxpayers, however, the alternative minimum tax limits the benefits from these cuts by increasing the effective marginal tax rates on capital gains and dividend income. The culprit is the...

From an economic perspective, marginal tax rates play a critical role in determining the consequences of a change in tax policy. In an uncomplicated tax system the marginal rate is simply equal to the statutory rate. For millions of taxpayers, however, marginal tax rates differ markedly from...

A taxpayer's effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) is the percentage of an additional dollar of income that would be paid in federal income tax. An individual's EMTR could affect the decision to work or save more, or avoid income tax. We use the TPC's microsimulation model of the federal tax system...

Republican Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson has announced a tax plan that combines tax cut extensions, additional tax cuts, and an election to pay tax under a new alternative tax system that would substitute a larger standard deduction for all current deductions and credits and have two...

Student loans, mortgage guarantees, and other lending programs create special challenges for federal budgeting. Under official budget rules, these programs are projected to bring in $200 billion over the next decade. Under an alternative, favored by many analysts, they appear to lose $100...

Recently, there has been a spate of corporate inversions, where U.S. multinational corporations have combined with foreign companies, arranging their corporate structure to locate the residence of the resulting corporation in a foreign country with an attractive corporate tax climate. This paper...

Under current law, taxpayers may deduct interest paid on up to $1 million of acquisition debt used to buy, build, or improve a primary or secondary residence. Taxpayers can also deduct interest paid on up to $100,000 in home equity loans or other loans secured by their homes. This report...

A corporate income tax can play a useful role by preventing shareholders from deferring tax on retained corporate profits. The current U.S. corporate income tax is deeply flawed, however, because it relies on definitions of corporate residence and income sourcing that corporations can easily...

This paper documents the increased role of pass-through entities and the associated decline in use of the taxable corporate form since the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) and discusses implications for the design of tax policy. We show how significant reductions in the corporate tax rate, absent...

This paper evaluates six options to achieve across-the-board reductions to a group of major exclusions and deductions in the income tax: (1) limiting their tax benefit to a maximum percentage of income; (2) imposing a fixed dollar cap; (3) reducing them by a fixed-percentage amount; (4) limiting...