The economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic poses a triple challenge for tax policy in the United States. Lawmakers are tasked with crafting a policy response that will accelerate the economic recovery, reduce the mounting deficit, and protect the most vulnerable.
To assist lawmakers in navigating the challenge, and to help the American public understand the tax changes being proposed, the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy modeled how 70 potential changes to the tax code would affect the U.S. economy, distribution of the tax burden, and federal revenue.
In tax policy there is an ever-present trade-off among how much revenue a tax will raise, who bears the burden of a tax, and what impact a tax will have on economic growth. Armed with the information in our new book, Options for Reforming America’s Tax Code 2.0, policymakers can debate the relative merits and trade-offs of each option to improve the tax code in a post-pandemic world.
Recent Study on Financial Transaction Taxes Understates their Economic Harm
FTTs are unreliable sources of revenue and can increase risky financial activities. When looking to address income inequality and raise revenue, lawmakers should look to alternatives to this complicated and distortive tax.
5 min readBloomberg’s Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) Proposal Revives Bad Policy
In a way, one should sometimes be most wary of taxes with a very, very, very low rate. It suggests a certain hesitance on the part of the policymaker, as if he knows he’s playing with something potentially very damaging.
4 min readHow Controlled Foreign Corporation Rules Look Around the World: Germany
Germany has had a Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) regime since 1972, when the German Foreign Transactions Tax Act was enacted. Under the German regime, a CFC is a foreign company where its capital or voting rights are either directly or indirectly majority-owned by German residents at the end of its fiscal year.
6 min readKansas, Nebraska, and Utah Lawmakers Pursue “Not GILTI” Verdicts
Taxing GILTI puts states at a competitive disadvantage compared to their peers—all for a tax that makes very little sense at the state level, and which legislators never sought in the first place.
5 min readToomey Introduces Legislation to Make Bonus Depreciation Permanent and Fix the Retail Glitch
Making 100 percent bonus depreciation permanent avoids the uncertainty associated with the phaseout of a powerful pro-growth policy and would provide a cost-effective boost to long-run economic output, wages, and employment in the United States.
2 min read