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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.

U.S. Effective Corporate Tax Rate Is Right in Line With Its OECD Peers President Biden infrastructure plan Biden corporate tax proposals

U.S. Effective Corporate Tax Rate Is Right in Line With Its OECD Peers

Whether we use corporate tax collections as a portion of GDP, average effective tax rates, or marginal tax rates, each measure shows that the U.S. effective corporate tax burden is close to or above the average compared to its OECD peers. Raising corporate income taxes would put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage, whether one looks at statutory tax rates or effective corporate tax rates.

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ARPA Allocates $2 Billion to Nonexistent County Governments

The government of Hartford County, Connecticut is in line to receive $173 million in local aid under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). There’s only one problem: the government of Hartford County doesn’t exist, nor do any of Connecticut’s other counties have county-level government despite being allocated a collective $691 million under the bill.

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A CEO Tax Is the Wrong Way to Help Workers

In an effort to rein in perceived excesses in executive compensation, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other co-sponsors have proposed to increase a company’s corporate income tax rate progressively based on the difference between median worker pay and CEO pay.

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Evaluating West Virginia Income Tax Repeal Plans

States which forgo income taxes have seen population and economic growth vastly outstripping their peers, and a post-pandemic culture that is friendlier to remote work will greatly enhance tax competition.

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