Publications on Taxes & Social Programs

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain wants to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer travel season. Truckers say they like the idea. In this Marketplace commentary, Len Burman, Director of the Tax Policy Center explains why Senator McCain’s proposal won’t get us where he wants to go. http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/04/17/burman_commentary/

What if President William Howard Taft and his Congress had written laws that specified how all the government’s revenues at the beginning of the 21st century were to be spent? Preposterous? Well, the laws on the books today not only dictate how all revenues collected in 2030 and beyond will be spent, they also predetermine most of the next president’s spending. No wonder the campaign promises of the presidential candidates sound hollow.

Income tax provisions affect the buildup of retirement assets during workers' careers and after-tax income following retirement. This paper uses the Urban Institute's DYNASIM model to simulate how potential changes in the tax treatment of retirement saving, Social Security benefits, and income from assets outside retirement accounts may affect boomers' retirement incomes. Changes in the income thresholds for taxing Social Security benefits have the largest impact on middle-income boomers, while changes in contribution limits for retirement saving plans and tax rates on capital gains and dividends have the largest impact on the highest-income boomers.

The Health Coverage Tax Credit (HCTC), which pays 65 percent of health Insurance premiums for 16,000 trade-displaced workers and others, is the only use of federal income tax credits to cover the otherwise uninsured. In pending legislation to reauthorize Trade Adjustment Assistance, Congress has an opportunity to address HCTC's major problems, including participation by only 15 percent of eligible workers and administrative costs that consume roughly a third of federal spending on the credit. HCTC teaches lessons about how to structure tax credits serving a larger group of uninsured, such as credits proposed by Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates.

This report tallies all federal spending and tax subsidies aimed at promoting the economic mobility of Americans for 1980, 2006, and 2012. This first effort at defining a mobility budget--$746 billion in 2006--reaches two major conclusions: (1) poor and lower-income households owe little or no tax and so are excluded from the bulk of economic mobility programs, which are often delivered in the form of tax subsidies; and (2) while these households do benefit from many other federal programs, those programs generally are not aimed at promoting mobility--and sometimes even discourage it. Furthermore, under current law, mobility enhancing programs targeted to toward lower income households would decline as a share of GDP from 2006 to 2012, while those targeted to the better off would increase over the same period.