TaxVox: Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

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The voices of Tax Policy Center's researchers and staff

Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

Misrepresenting the Bush Tax Cuts, or the Return of Death Panels

August 23, 2010 –
The story goes that when Lyndon Johnson was losing his first congressional election he put out the word that his opponent was having sex with barnyard animals. An aide innocently warned Johnson that this wasn’t true. “Make the SOB deny it,” LBJ was said to have replied.
Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

Another View of the Bush Tax Cuts

August 17, 2010 –
Adam Looney at the Brookings Institution has a nice new paper on the Bush tax cuts. It can be summarized in this picture:
Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

The Bush Tax Cuts and Small Business: What We Know

August 4, 2010 –
Those who would extend all of the Bush tax cuts, including for the highest-earners, are zeroing in what would happen to small business if Congress lets those top tax rates rise. And they are not subtle. Allowing top rates to increase would be a “job-killing tax hike” says Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).
Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

Extend the Bush Tax Cuts? It’s the Wrong Question

August 3, 2010 –
Washington is about to spend months trying to answer the wrong question. Instead of reprising their partisan, tiresome, and largely unproductive argument about what to do with the Bush tax cuts, President Obama and Congress ought to be asking a very different question: How do we build a tax system capable of generating the revenues we need to fund the government we want in the most efficient and fair way possible?
Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

Congress, the Bush Tax Cuts, and the Perils of Pauline

July 29, 2010 –
If you think this year’s battles over health care, stimulus, climate change, and financial regulation have been nasty, just wait ‘til Washington tackles the Bush tax cuts. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill say they will consider the fate of those tax cuts--due to expire at year's end-- just before the congressional elections. That will set up a high-stakes brawl on a political and economic high-wire.
Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms

Extending the Bush Tax Cuts

July 16, 2010 –
What should Congress do about the Bush tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of the year? That question is going to absorb much of Washington’s attention through the fall and—if present hyper-partisan trends continue—perhaps even beyond. On Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee kicked off the coming drama by bringing in a group of tax experts to set the stage.
Federal Budget and Economy

We Can’t Always Get What We Want: Why Governing Americans is So Hard

July 13, 2010 –
The conventional wisdom is that Americans are fed up with their government. But our demands on policymakers are so inconsistent and irrational that we make governing nearly impossible. We hate big deficits, but oppose the actual tax increases or spending cuts that we need to dam the flood of the red ink. We are furious that government passed an $800 billion stimulus last year, but feel lawmakers are not doing enough to get the economy going. We want government to “do something” about the gulf oil spill but reject government interference in private business.
Federal Budget and Economy

The Tea Party: Tax Cuts and Smaller Government, But More Red Ink

June 8, 2010 –
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, among others, thinks the tea party movement might help drive deficit reduction. I disagree. I don’t believe most tea party leaders or candidates are remotely interested in slowing the flow of federal red ink. They are plainly interested in tax cuts—a core belief that appears repeatedly on Websites, position papers, and speeches throughout the movement. And while tea partiers say they favor smaller government, many in fact propose to shrink it in only trivial ways—by cutting earmarks or waste and abuse. Candidates elected on platforms supporting very large tax cuts and small spending reductions are likely to oppose aggressive efforts to reduce deficits, not back them. While some analysts see the tea partiers as the 21st century progeny of Ross Perot’s fiscal conservatism, nothing could be further from the truth.
Individual Taxes

The Wyden-Gregg Tax Reform: More Progressive and Roughly Revenue Neutral

May 24, 2010 –
The bipartisan tax reform proposal of senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Judd Gregg (R-NH) roughly breaks even (as the lawmakers intended) and makes the tax code somewhat more progressive, according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center. TPC analysts Jim Nunns and Jeff Rohaly estimate the Wyden-Gregg plan would raise about $22 billion through 2020 compared to TPC’s “current policy” baseline. That’s a tiny fraction of the $35 trillion Treasury is expected to collect over the decade. The reform plan—called the Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010 (BTSFA or S. 3018)-- would lose a bit in the first few years, but generate slowly increasing amounts of new tax revenue after that.
Individual Taxes

Ryan Responds to TPC's Analysis of his Roadmap

March 10, 2010 –
Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) has responded to the Tax Policy Center's analysis of the revenue portion of his Roadmap for America's Future. TPC found Ryan's major tax restructuring would likely raise significantly less revenue than he expected and would substantially lower taxes for high-earners. In his response, Ryan suggests he'd be willing to adjust his plan to hit his revenue target of 19 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Here is his response: