Missing out on a tax rebate check is certainly disheartening, but New Jersey wallets are getting actively drained by an even bigger problem in the tax code: the state’s graduated-rate income tax thresholds don’t change with inflation, either.
The 2026 Spanish Regional Tax Competitiveness Index allows policymakers and taxpayers to evaluate and measure how their regions’ tax systems compare.
8 min read
Congress has passed some major simplifying reforms in recent years, but the tax code has still grown more complex over the past few decades. New carveouts, savings vehicles, and targeted tax increases would complicate it further.
8 min read
The proposed GROWTH Act would make the tax treatment of investment funds more consistent and improve the tax treatment of saving in the US by allowing investors to defer tax on qualifying reinvested capital gains distributions until they sell their fund shares.
6 min read
California’s billionaire tax is on the ballot this November, and it raises more questions than answers. From lost government revenue to legal battles that could drag on for years, what would this first-in-the-nation wealth tax actually do?
Americans will spend 6.9 billion hours complying with IRS tax filing and reporting requirements in 2026, costing about $387 billion in lost productivity. Including an additional $157 billion in out-of-pocket costs, complying with the federal tax code will cost Americans more than $544 billion this year, over 1.7 percent of GDP.
10 min read
The US federal government faces several fiscal challenges in the coming decades, including the growing burden of federal healthcare programs and tax preferences.
14 min read
The “no tax on” deductions show the drawbacks of using narrowly tailored provisions to provide tax relief.
6 min read
Jock taxes on highly paid athletes and entertainers are here to stay, but states could make life easier for the rest of us, at very little cost, by adopting reasonable nonresident filing and withholding thresholds for ordinary taxpayers.
5 min read
Investment in digital assets, long thought of as a niche interest reserved for enthusiasts, has broken into the mainstream. In 2026, about one in five US adults report being invested in or using cryptocurrency.
5 min read
Economists and journalists have been pointing to a labor share of income series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as evidence that capital is taking an ever-increasing slice of the economic pie. But a closer look at the national income accounts shows a different story.
7 min read
Tax Foundation’s new resource, Options for Reforming America’s Tax Code 3.0, demonstrates that not all revenue-raising options are created equal—some do more harm to the economy than others for the same amount of revenue.
7 min read
When properly measured, consistent with how we assess progressivity in tax policy, Social Security benefits are progressive.
5 min read
While uncapping the payroll tax and raising individual income tax rates are often the go-to reform options for policymakers, base broadeners like ESI and other fringe benefits are much better alternatives. They can raise significant revenue, while improving the neutrality of the tax code and preventing the need for increases in statutory tax rates.
6 min read
Poland taxes its individual business owners through alternative regimes and a series of thresholds, several of them sharp notches that imply significant tax costs for businesses crossing them.
11 min read
The California Billionaire Tax Act (Proposition 40), which imposes a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires’ net worth, is vulnerable to numerous constitutional challenges, any of which could invalidate the tax in whole or in part.
28 min read
Some taxes have more powerful economic effects than others, and that’s a lesson policymakers should absorb as they work to craft a tax code that encourages growth and raises sustainable revenue.
8 min read
Though they are often framed as affecting only the richest households, the economic effects of wealth taxes extend much further by reducing capital formation, discouraging entrepreneurship, curtailing wage and employment growth, and ultimately weakening the overall economy.
Wealth taxes not only collect little revenue and create legal uncertainty, but an OECD report argues that they can also disincentivize entrepreneurship, harming innovation and long-term growth.
5 min read
The California Billionaire Tax Act’s residency provisions are exceptionally vulnerable to legal challenge. Even if the tax passes and survives challenges to its broader constitutionality, billionaires who leave California sometime in 2026 have good reason to believe they can escape some or all of the tax.