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.

 

Rental Car Taxes and Fees
Blog

Renting a Car? Half Your Bill May Be Taxes and Fees

Rental cars are some of the most heavily taxed transactions in the US. Rather than levying additional taxes on rental cars by trying to export the tax burden to nonresidents, municipalities should enact principled, neutral transportation tax policy that is unlikely to discourage visitors, tourists, and other economic activity.

5 min read
Germany Tax Burden on Labor and Consumption, Vale-Added Tax Base
Blog
Europe

Shifting Germany’s Tax Burden from Labor to Consumption Requires a Broad VAT Base

Shifting Germany’s tax mix away from labor to consumption remains a sound policy route to strengthen the country’s labor supply, but further eroding the VAT base with preferential rates for selected goods and services would counteract this goal by depleting the extra revenue for labor tax cuts while providing less-targeted relief for low-income households.

6 min read
California Worldwide Combined Reporting, CA Corporate Income Taxation
Blog

California’s Mandatory Worldwide Combined Reporting Proposal Is a Mistake

California lawmakers are considering mandating worldwide combined reporting, bringing back a policy the state abandoned in the 1980s due to strong pushback from international trading partners and the federal government. The policy failed to work as intended then and doesn’t make any better sense now.

8 min read
Economic Impact of Tariffs, trade tensions, trade, china tariffs
Blog

American Compass’s “Tariff Tally” Doesn’t Add Up

The evidence overall paints a far different picture than American Compass presents, and a consistent theoretical framework undercuts its assertions of how tariffs should be expected to impact the economy moving forward.

25 min read