Erica York is Senior Economist and Research Director with Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy. She previously worked as an auditor at a large community bank in Kansas and interned at Tax Foundation’s Center for State Tax Policy.
Her analysis has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, and other national and international media outlets. She holds a master’s degree in Economics from Wichita State University and an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and Economics from Sterling (KS) College, where she is currently an adjunct professor. Erica lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children.
Taxes are once again at the forefront of the public policy debate as legislators grapple with how to fund new infrastructure spending, among other priorities. Our tax tracker helps you stay up-to-date as new tax plans emerge from the Biden administration and Congress.
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While falling short of comprehensively reforming the complex U.S. retirement savings system, House and Senate lawmakers have proposed bipartisan bills to help simplify and expand access to retirement savings accounts to more workers.
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The negative effects of President Biden’s proposed 28 percent corporate income tax rate could be tempered by improving how the corporate income tax base treats investment expenses.
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Policymakers concerned about the current tax treatment of unrealized capital gains would be better off exploring policy solutions like consumption taxes rather than tried-and-failed strategies.
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A recent study identifies dozens of large companies that paid no income taxes in 2020. While such studies get headlines and may seem shocking, the reality is much more mundane.
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The Biden administration will have to balance the desire to increase social spending through the tax code with the need to collect revenue and have a tax system that is transparent and easy to understand.
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During the pandemic, economic relief administered through the tax code exploded as Congress passed nearly $6 trillion of legislation into law. That left the 2021 tax filing season, which ended May 17, with complications that still linger.
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In a new report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzes federal policies that influence R&D spending in the pharmaceutical industry. The report highlights how taxes affect R&D investment incentives, underscoring the importance of structuring the tax code so that it is not biased against investment.
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While much of the tax policy now under debate aims to increase the tax burden on businesses, several policies in the newly released Republican Study Committee (RSC) budget for Fiscal Year 2022 focus on reducing the tax code’s barriers to investment and saving.
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The Biden administration’s proposed American Families Plan includes several major tax changes. Explore the tax proposals in the American Families Plan.
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Some lawmakers have expressed concerns about President Biden’s proposal to raise the federal corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and instead suggest raising the rate to 25 percent.
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Under President Biden’s tax plan, the United States would tax corporate income at the highest top rate in the industrialized world, averaging 65.1 percent.
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In his first 100 days as president, Joe Biden has proposed more than a dozen significant changes to the U.S. tax code that would raise upwards of $3 trillion in revenue and reduce incentives to invest, save, and work in the United States.
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The Biden administration is proposing to tax long-term capital gains at ordinary income rates for high earners, which will bring the top federal rate to highs not seen since the 1920s.
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The top federal rate on capital gains would be 43.4 percent under Biden’s tax plan (when including the net investment income tax). Rates would be even higher in many U.S. states due to state and local capital gains taxes, leading to a combined average rate of over 48 percent compared to about 29 percent under current law.
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President Biden’s choice to fund new spending programs with increased corporate taxes comes with trade-offs for American output and incomes.
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The Options guide presents the economic effects we estimate would occur in the long term, or 20 to 30 years from now, but we can also use our model to show the cumulative effects of the policy change—providing more context, for instance, about how the effects of a higher corporate income tax rate compound over time, which we estimate would reduce GDP by a cumulative $720 billion over the next 10 years.
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An increase in the federal corporate tax rate to 28 percent would raise the U.S. federal-state combined tax rate to 32.34 percent, higher than every country in the OECD, the G7, and all our major trade partners and competitors including China.
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In an effort to rein in perceived excesses in executive compensation, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other co-sponsors have proposed to increase a company’s corporate income tax rate progressively based on the difference between median worker pay and CEO pay.
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Since 1987, unemployment compensation benefits have been subject to federal income tax and, in most states, to state income tax. According to the Congressional Research Service, such treatment—including unemployment compensation benefits in taxable income—is common across industrial nations.
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