View Research by Author - Surachai Khitatrakun

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Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/SurachaiKhitatrakun

Policymakers are considering modifications to the tax treatment of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) as a way to raise revenue to help pay for health reform and provide incentives to reduce health care costs. Understanding how current subsidies work is important to assessing health reform proposals. This brief presents essential information about the structure and distribution of existing tax subsidies for ESI and the implications for policy options.

Tax and fiscal policy will loom large in the next president's domestic policy agenda. Nearly all of the tax cuts enacted since 2001 expire at the end of 2010 and the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) threatens to ensnare tens of millions of Americans. While a permanent fix palatable to both political parties has proven elusive, both candidates have proposed major tax changes. This report describes how we performed our modeling and analysis, outlines the major tax proposals, and discusses the implications of their policies for the revenue raised, taxpayer economic activity, and the distribution of the tax burden.

Tax and fiscal policy will loom large in the next president's domestic policy agenda. Nearly all of the tax cuts enacted since 2001 expire at the end of 2010 and the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) threatens to ensnare tens of millions of Americans. While a permanent fix palatable to both political parties has proven elusive, both candidates have proposed major tax changes. This report describes how we performed our modeling and analysis, outlines the major tax proposals, and discusses the implications of their policies for the revenue raised, taxpayer economic activity, and the distribution of the tax burden.

KiwiSaver is a new saving incentive program in New Zealand that requires automatic enrollment of all new employees, with an option to opt out. KiwiSaver also subsidizes participation, but its subsidies are smaller than tax subsidies for saving in qualified retirement plans in the United States. Recent research shows that using automatic enrollment as a default rule substantially increases participation in retirement saving plans, but evidence on whether saving incentives plans increase net saving is mixed. KiwiSaver is the first large-scale test of whether default rules can be more effective than financial incentives in increasing retirement saving.

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