Evaluating U.S. Tax Reform Options & Trade-Offs

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.

Tax competition and the global minimum tax: the latest on the global tax agreement at the OECD
Blog
Europe

What’s Next for Tax Competition?

The rules of tax competition are changing with the recent agreement on a global minimum tax and other changes to tax rules around the world, but that does not mean the contest is over.

5 min read
Blog
Europe

Assessing the EU Tax Observatory’s View on Profit Shifting and the Global Minimum Tax

The EU Tax Observatory has taken an extreme view in assessing the global minimum tax. The rules were not meant to immediately reduce the stock of shifted profits or align profitability levels more closely with employment costs. The rules do change incentives for multinationals, but profits may continue to remain in low-tax jurisdictions for many years.

6 min read
Future of EU tax policy full expensing cost recovery corporate taxation
Blog
Europe

Is EU VAT Compliance Actually Improving?

While the European Commission focuses on improving VAT compliance, policy is a major contributor to VAT revenue losses. The VAT actionable policy gap is 15.65 percent, more than triple the compliance gap.

5 min read
Jeff Bezos Move Undercuts Proposed Washington State Wealth Tax
Blog

Jeff Bezos’s Move Undercuts Proposed Washington State Wealth Tax

Whether tax savings motivated his move or not, the implications for Washington are very real, and serve to illustrate just how dangerous it can be to design tax systems that rely so overwhelmingly on a very small number of taxpayers choosing to stay put.

3 min read
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act or TCJA corporate tax was boosted as part of broader economic effects of the 2017 tax law
Blog

New Study Finds TCJA Strongly Boosted Corporate Investment

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was the largest corporate tax reform in a generation, lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, temporarily allowing full expensing for short-lived assets (referred to as bonus depreciation), and overhauling the international tax code.

6 min read
do people really move because of taxes
Blog
Short Form

Do People Really Move Because of Taxes?

What do The Rolling Stones, NFL star Tyreek Hill, and Maryland millionaires have in common? They all moved because of taxes.

4 min read