This report presents updated figures in 2020 dollars for the lifetime benefits earned and the lifetime taxes paid by hypothetical workers participating in Social Security and Medicare. For a single male earning average wages every year and retiring in 2020 at age 65, lifetime Social Security and...

This paper examines the fiscal system put in place in the former Confederacy in the decades after Reconstruction. Overturning Reconstruction-era policies that taxed wealth and invested in public services, the white supremacist governments that came to power in the later 19th Century slashed...

To raise revenue in a progressive, efficient, and administrable manner, this chapter proposes a new national consumption tax: a broad-based credit-invoice value-added tax (VAT). Th e proposal comes with several qualifications: the VAT should complement, not substitute for, new direct taxes on...

State government tax revenues showed year-over-year growth at 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2020. However, preliminary data indicate double-digit declines in state government tax revenues in the second quarter of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and...

This report describes the Tax Policy Center’s (TPC’s) improved methodology for analyzing the taxation of pass-through income (income generated through business activities that is taxed at the individual level). Under current law, certain types of pass-through income are taxed at different rates...

This paper describes the updated methodology that the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) uses to estimate the benefits taxpayers receive from proposals that allow them to save through a qualified retirement savings plan. We present tables comparing how we currently measure these benefits...

The earned income tax credit (EITC) and child tax credit (CTC) provide substantial benefits to working families with children. The EITC also provides modest benefits to workers without custodial children, often called “childless workers” for tax purposes. Together, the credits lift almost 9...

This report describes the Tax Policy Center (TPC) Microsimulation Model’s revamped home mortgage interest deduction (MID) module. The TPC tax model uses the module for simulating proposals that reform the MID. The new MID module improves upon the prior one in accounting for potential changes in...

The Statistics of Income division of the Internal Revenue Service releases an annual public-use file of individual income tax returns that is invaluable to tax analysts in government agencies, nonprofit research organizations, and the private sector. However, the Statistics of Income division...

This report describes the Tax Policy Center (TPC) Microsimulation Model’s revamped health module.  The TPC tax model uses the health module for simulating tax expenditures for health care, analyzing changes in the tax treatment of employer-provided health benefits, and evaluating health-related...