Federal Tax Policy

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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Baucus, Conrad Support 2-Year AMT Patch; Rangel, Neal Embrace Repeal

Mar 5, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus (D-MT) has abandoned his support of full AMT repeal and joined with Senate Budget chair Kent Conrad (D-ND) in favor of a two-year AMT patch. Their position is already "http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002458033.html" target="_blank">part of a Senate bill (S. 619) introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) along with nine co-sponsors. The proposal would cost more than $90 billion over 10 years, but nobody has said yet how or even if it would be offset.

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Resolution Tea-Leaf Reading: The Conrad Lexicon

Mar 1, 2007 by Craig Jennings

If you found Senate Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad's comments on the Budget Resolution quoted in our blog yesterday inscrutable, you are not alone. Policy wonks, journalists, lobbyists, industry groups, and aides have spent much of the past two days trying to interpret the meaning of Conrad's promise, "no tax rate increases," given his broader promise of balancing the budget by 2012. So we offer an abridged Conrad Lexicon, to assist in parsing the delphic utterance:

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Bush's $526 Billion Tax Increase

Mar 1, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Congress's Joint Committee on Taxes has put out a preliminary examination of the Bush health care tax plan. Over the next ten years, they estimate it would raise taxes by $526 billion. President Bush had claimed the package would be a wash in net. Check out this AP article for more: President Bush's health insurance proposals would cost taxpayers $526 billion through 2017, according to a preliminary estimate from Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation.

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A Bid for a Mimimalist Minimum Wage Bill

Feb 28, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Has Reid been Reading Us? It may be impatience, or posturing, or good policy (in our view), but for whatever reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) threatened last night to scotch the minimum wage tax package negotiations and schedule a(nother) vote on a "clean" minimum wage hike.

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Fiscal Stakes in the Minimum Wage Tax Packages

Feb 27, 2007 by Dana Chasin

If you think the choice between the House and Senate minimum wage tax packages is a coin-toss between two fully-offset, revenue-neutral, fiscally fungible approaches, think again. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' paper released today, Small Business Tax Package In Senate Minimum Wage Bill Poses Fiscal Risks, makes a strong case against the Senate's $8.3 billion package, built on two arguments:

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WSJ Tax Hacks vs. AMT Facts

Feb 27, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Linda Beale, law professor at Wayne State University Law School, provides a much more detailed rejoinder to the Wall Street Journal piece, Bill Clinton's AMT Bomb," than we could in our blog yesterday. Her main points are as follows:

The 2001-2006 tax cuts passed by the Republican-dominated Congress and the Bush Administration were packaged with no plan to repeal the AMT, since AMT revenues were needed to pretend that the tax cut package was considerably cheaper than it was known to be

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President Promotes Health Care Tax Package

Feb 26, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Merrill Goozner informs us that the President talked up his health care tax initiative on Saturday. Seems like he's not going to let this one drop, but we'll see.

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WSJ: AMT fix "an excuse to [repeal] Bush tax cuts"

Feb 26, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The Wall Street Journal published a particularly useless, factually-selective, poorly-argued partisan skreed last Friday about "how the AMT's relentless expansion in recent years is [the fault of] none other than William Jefferson Clinton" and how the AMT ("one more liberal monster that was created in the name of soaking the rich") has become "an excuse to justify repealing the Bush tax cuts." The bottom-line warning of the (by-line-less) Journal piece:

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CBO Puts Tax Policy Options on the Table

Feb 23, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Today, CBO released its biennial set of policy options, "to help policymakers in their annual tasks of making budgetary choices, setting priorities, and adapting to changing circumstances." Some of the options seem particularly fiscally favorable, politically feasible, and equitable, among them:

OPTION 17 -- Include All Income Earned Abroad by U.S. Citizen in Taxable Income. (5-year savings: $22.9 billion; 10-year savings: $57 billion)
OPTION 24 -- Set the Corporate Tax Rate at 35 Percent for All Corporations. (5-year savings: $13.2 billion; 10-year savings: $27.6 billion)

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