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.
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Legislation Introduced to Cancel R&D Amortization
Canceling the amortization of research and development costs would reduce federal revenue, but policymakers have a variety of options to offset the costs.
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Booker’s Plan to Eliminate Step-up in Basis and Expand the Estate Tax
Removing step-up in basis would encourage taxpayers to realize capital gains and it would plug a hole in the current income tax, while increasing federal revenue. Combined, however, with the estate tax, this would result in a significant tax burden on certain saving by requiring both the appreciation in and total value of transferred property to be taxed at death
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Senator Sanders Proposes a Tax on “Extreme” Wealth
Bernie Sanders recently became the second major Democratic presidential candidate to propose a wealth tax.
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JCT Report Shows Capital Gains are Sensitive to Taxation
JCT’s report on capital gains elasticities reminds us that capital gains realizations, at least under a tax system that allows deferral, are sensitive to tax rates. Moving to mark-to-market taxation of all capital gains would remove this sensitivity by taxing capital gains annually.
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