The most recent versions of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan are improvements on the original proposal, but would still reduce economic growth and average after-tax incomes for the top 80 percent of earners in the long run.
7 min read
The nicotine tax proposal in the Build Back Better Act neglects sound excise tax policy design and by doing so risks harming public health. Lawmakers should reconsider this approach to nicotine taxation.
8 min read
Under the latest iteration of the House Build Back Better Act (BBBA), the average top tax rate on personal income would reach 57.4 percent, giving the U.S. the highest rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
2 min read
Under the Build Back Better framework, six states and D.C. would face combined top marginal capital gains tax rates of more than 40 percent, nearing the top rate among OECD countries.
3 min read
Under the new Build Back Better framework, the United States would tax capital gains at the third-highest top marginal rate among rich nations, averaging nearly 37 percent.
1 min read
Congress is debating new ways to raise revenue that would make the tax code more complex and more difficult to administer. The new proposals—imposing an alternative minimum tax on corporate book income, applying an excise tax on stock buybacks, and, at one point this week, a tax on unrealized capital gains for billionaires—are unreliable and highly complex ways to raise revenue.
10 min read
President Biden and Congressional Democrats introduced a scaled-back proposal of their reconciliation package, with House leadership saying they hope to vote on this new trillion-dollar package ASAP. We talk through what made it into the deal, what was cut, and what the impact of these tax changes would be.
Congressional Democrats are reported to be weighing a special tax on the assets of billionaires to raise revenues to pay for their Build Back Better spending plan. There are two fundamental challenges to such a plan.
8 min read
The legislation put forward by Democratic members of the House of Representatives would reverse many of the 2017 reforms while increasing burdens on businesses and workers.
2 min read
With corporate and individual rate hikes potentially out of the Build Back Better (BBB) reconciliation package, lawmakers are weighing alternative options to raise revenue. Rather than come up with untested proposals and complicated changes to the tax base, they should prioritize options that raise revenue while improving the structure of the tax code.
4 min read
Raising taxes on stock-based compensation through a book income tax will disadvantage this form of compensation and produce more complexity in the tax system without providing benefits to workers.
5 min read
One has to wonder how stable or sustainable the Democrats’ spending program can be if it must rely so heavily on the taxes paid by such a small number of taxpayers as in the top 1 percent.
5 min read
Reducing the tax gap is a good idea, but the reporting requirements for financial institutions could be better-targeted at the problem at hand.
4 min read
President Biden expanded and fundamentally changed the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for one year in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed in March 2021. Policymakers are now deciding the future of the expansion as part of the proposed reconciliation package, but a wide range of estimates for the effects of a permanent expansion is confusing the debate.
7 min read
Under the House Ways and Means plan to raise taxes on corporations and individuals, the integrated tax rate on corporate income would rise to the third highest in the OECD. To reduce this burden, policymakers could explore integrating the individual and corporate tax systems.
8 min read
In an effort to raise roughly $100 billion, the House proposal would double cigarette taxes and increase all other tobacco and nicotine taxes to comparable rates—a strategy with severe unintended consequences.
5 min read
Using Tax Foundation’s Multinational Tax Model, we estimate the effective tax rates on controlled foreign corporation (CFC) profits under current law and under each of the proposed plans for business tax hikes.
9 min read
If the spending in the $3.5 trillion budget resolution were financed entirely from tax increases, it would rival as a share of GDP the tax increases used to finance World War II and the Korean War.
3 min read
Federal policy is hard. Federal health care policy during reconciliation while governing with razor-thin margins is really, really hard. We break down the debate on Capitol Hill over drug pricing and what the tradeoffs would be of having the federal government set prescription drug prices.
In general, the effective tax rates on the foreign profits of U.S. multinationals are not that low relative to the U.S. tax rate, contrary to popular rhetoric.
7 min read