Income redistribution has been a hot topic since President Obama told "Joe the Plumber" on the campaign trail that "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." New analysis of President Obama's Budget finds that he is targeting the nation's highest earners for greater income redistributions. By 2012, the federal government is scheduled to be redistributing an extra $79 billion from the top-earning 5 percent of American families, and $71 billion of that will be paid by the top-earning 1 percent of families.
In this edition of the Tax Policy Podcast, Manager of Media Relations Natasha Altamirano interviews Senior Economist Gerald Prante, who discusses the Tax Foundation's "fiscal incidence" model, a computer simulation of the U.S. fiscal system with an innovation: It measures the redistributive effects of both spending and tax policies.
View the latest study in the Tax Foundation Special Report series authored by Prante and Chief Economist Patrick Fleenor, titled "How Much Does President Obama's Budget Redistribute Income?"
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For more on corporate taxes, see Kyle's recent study "U.S. Multinationals Paid More Than $100 Billion in Foreign Income Taxes."
For more on corporate taxes, see the recent study by economist Kyle Pomerleau "U.S. Multinationals Paid More Than $100 Billion in Foreign Income Taxes."