Dr. Huaqun Li is a Senior Economist at the Tax Foundation. She focuses on developing and maintaining the Foundation’s Taxes and Growth Model, which models the budgetary and economic effects of changes to federal tax policy.
Huaqun also uses the Taxes and Growth Model to model individual and corporate tax policy proposals and reform plans and helps with publishing the results. Before joining the Tax Foundation, she was a research economist at Regional Economics Models, Inc. at Amherst, MA, where she worked on model building, empirical analysis, and new product development on economic and demographic forecast models.
Dr. Huaqun Li received her PhD in Public Policy Analysis from George Mason University. Her primary research areas include regional economic development, regional inequality, entrepreneurship and new firms, as well as regional development in China.
Huaqun lives in Fairfax, Virginia. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, hiking, and doing yoga.
We estimate Trump’s proposed tariffs and partial retaliation from all trading partners would together offset more than two-thirds of the long-run economic benefit of his proposed tax cuts.
President Biden is proposing extraordinarily large tax hikes on businesses and the top 1 percent of earners that would put the US in a distinctly uncompetitive international position and threaten the health of the US economy.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) significantly lowered the effective tax rates on business income, but the impact was not the same for C corporations and pass-through businesses.
Universal savings accounts would boost savings for low-income households, allowing them to better withstand economic shocks, such as pandemics and recessions, and plan for major expenses, such as an expanded family, education, and housing needs.
Policymakers should have two priorities in the upcoming economic policy debates: a larger economy and fiscal responsibility. Principled, pro-growth tax policy can help accomplish both.
The House Ways and Means Committee has advanced a tax deal to the House floor that would temporarily—and retroactively—restore two major business deductions for cost recovery and expand the child tax credit through 2025.
Lawmakers will have to weigh the economic, revenue, and distributional trade-offs of extending or making permanent the various provisions of the TCJA as they decide how to approach the upcoming expirations. A commitment to growth, opportunity, and fiscal responsibility should guide the approach.
Income taxes impose steeper economic costs, and often steeper administrative and compliance costs, than consumption taxes. Moving to a consumption tax would end the tax bias against saving and investment and provide an opportunity to greatly simplify anti-poverty programs embedded in the tax code.
This tax reform plan would boost long-run GDP by 2.5%, grow wages by 1.4%, and add 1.3M jobs, all while collecting a similar amount of tax revenue as the current code and reducing the long-run debt burden.
According to our analysis, President Biden’s budget would reduce long-run economic output by about 1.3 percent and eliminate 335,000 FTE jobs. See what tax policies the president is proposing.
We find that the dynamic cost of permanent bonus depreciation rises by about 7 percent under 4 percent inflation, but the economic benefit, measured by the size of the economy, rises by about 25 percent.
The phaseout of 100 percent bonus depreciation, scheduled to take place after the end of 2022, will increase the after-tax cost of investment in the U.S. Permanently extending it would increase long-run economic output by 0.4 percent and increase employment by 73,000 FTE jobs.
How will the Inflation Reduction Act taxes impact inflation, economic growth, tax revenue, and everyday taxpayers? See Inflation Reduction Act tax changes.
Our new analysis reviews the basic structure of carbon taxes, how they compare to the existing set of climate policies, and how they could fit into various pro-growth tax reform packages.
Learn more about the House Build Back Better Act, including the latest details and analysis of the Biden tax increases and reconciliation bill tax proposals.
Over the next ten years, the structure of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) is scheduled to change, complicating efforts to extend enhanced CTC benefits or reform the CTC for the long-term. Rather than take an all-or-nothing approach or kick the can down the road by relying on temporary expansions, lawmakers could consider alternative options that better target low-income households, retain work incentives, reduce the impact on federal revenue, and provide taxpayers with a stable, consistent tax code.
While Congress continues to debate how to pay for President Biden’s spending proposals in the fiscal year 2022 budget, it is useful to consider the economic impact of a range of financing options in addition to the President’s proposed tax increases.
While it is good that policymakers are taking the impact of the economy on tax revenue seriously, it is important to remember that the dynamic effect of increased spending would only offset a small portion of the total spending. In other words, new spending—like tax cuts—rarely pays for itself.
The redistribution of income from the Biden administration’s tax proposals would involve many winners and losers, not only across different types of taxpayers but also geographically across the country. Launch our new interactive map to see average tax changes by state and congressional district over the budget window from 2022 to 2031.