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.
As the Biden administration and Congress consider making the expanded child tax credit permanent, a nearly $1.6 trillion expansion of tax code-administered benefits, they should consider financing it in a way that doesn’t create significant headwinds to economic recovery.
3 min read
The House Ways and Means Committee measures would further extend the relief measures created by the CARES Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and would go further by significantly expanding existing tax credits and making changes to the international tax system.
7 min read
President Biden is calling for a third round of economic impact payments to households as part of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Under the plan, the payments would be $1,400 per person, topping off the recent round of $600 payments for a combined $2,000 per person. Senate Republicans have proposed payment amounts of $1,000 per individual and $500 per dependent, lower income thresholds, and faster phaseout rates.
5 min read
President Biden’s plan builds on previous relief packages and would include larger payments to individuals, expanded relief for households and small businesses, funding for vaccine distribution, and aid to state and local governments.
7 min read
What has President Joe Biden proposed in terms of tax policy changes? Our experts provide the details and analyze the potential economic, revenue, and distributional impacts.
23 min read
On Thursday, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Steve Daines (R-MT), and Mitt Romney (R-UT) released the Coronavirus Assistance for American Families Act (CAAF), which would provide payments of $1,000 to adults and children with Social Security numbers, subject to income limits used in the original round of rebates. Among other modifications, it would be more generous to households and families with children when compared to the original rebates distributed under the CARES Act.
5 min read
Our analysis shows that the economic benefits of federal investment in productivity-enhancing infrastructure may be undercut by the negative effects of the financing of those investments, such as when the corporate income tax is increased.
6 min read
Permanent full expensing for all types of investment is an effective policy change lawmakers can use to encourage additional investment and economic growth.
9 min read
As Congress and the White House consider ways to shore up the economy in the face of a public health crisis, President Trump has suggested suspending the entire payroll tax for the duration of the year. That would cost about $950 billion, according to our analysis.
6 min read
The CARES Act, now signed into law, is intended to be a third round of federal government support in the wake of the coronavirus public health crisis and associated economic fallout, following the $8.3 billion in public health support passed two weeks ago and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act.
10 min read
The proposed Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act can be contrasted with the Senate Republican CARES Act, although they share some similarities by providing individual taxpayers with a rebate and modifying business tax provisions to provide liquidity for struggling firms.
5 min read
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have both released proposals to tax capital gains at ordinary income rates for the wealthiest Americans. As part of a broader platform to address income inequality, Biden and Sanders suggest increasing current capital gains rates on taxpayers with income over $1 million and $250,000, respectively.
21 min read
As policymakers evaluate changes to the tax code, such as proposals coming from presidential candidates and the White House, it will be important for them to evaluate the relative effects of various provisions. According to our analysis, making full expensing permanent would be one of the most efficient ways to increase after-tax incomes for the middle class.
3 min read
New modeling finds that the wealth taxes proposed by Sen. Warren and Sen. Sanders would raise significantly less revenue than promised, face serious administrative and compliance challenges, and would increase foreign ownership of U.S. capital.
38 min read
A low wealth tax rate is equivalent to a high-rate income tax. The interaction between wealth taxes and the existing income taxes must be considered when analyzing a wealth tax plan.
6 min read
Lawmakers recently introduced a bill to repeal the $10,000 cap on the state and local deduction (SALT) and raise the top tax rate on ordinary income from 37 percent to 39.6 percent.
4 min read
We estimate that a new proposal to expand the EITC would reduce federal revenue by $1.8 trillion and decrease long-run GDP by 0.29 percent, while boosting labor force participation for low-income tax filers by 822,788 full-time equivalent jobs.
10 min read