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.
While a sweeping tax policy bill is unlikely in the near future, lawmakers may be able to come together on a smaller scale. Pairing better cost recovery on a permanent basis with support for vulnerable households as well as additional pandemic-related relief would help promote a more rapid return to growth and help businesses and households weather the ongoing crisis.
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At the end of 2020, 33 temporary tax provisions are scheduled to expire at the federal level. These provisions generally fall under four categories: cost recovery, energy, individual, and other business provisions.
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Biden has not specified how he would approach the Trump tariffs, though his advisers have said he will at least review them.
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The Securing a Strong Retirement Act seeks to encourage retirement savings by simplifying and expanding the use of different types of retirement accounts.
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The latest IRS data continues to illustrate that the net effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was to reduce effective tax rates across income groups. In 2019, the TCJA again expanded the use of several deductions and credits, made the standard deduction more favorable than itemizing, and lowered taxes for most taxpayers.
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Increasing the corporate tax rate is often offered as a solution to income inequality because higher-income individuals tend to own more corporate shares than others and may bear the burden of a tax increase on corporate income.
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If we consider Biden’s tax plan over the entire budget window (2021 to 2030) as a percentage of GDP—1.30 percent—it would rank as the 6th largest tax increase since the 1940s and and one of the largest tax increases not associated with wartime funding.
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While there is still plenty of work to be done to get unemployed Americans back to work, the U.S. economy as a whole is now recovering strongly from the pandemic-induced economic downturn, outperforming forecasts from earlier in the year and outperforming most other developed countries.
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House Republicans recently introduced HR 11, the Commitment to American GROWTH Act, outlining an alternative to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s tax vision. The proposal would address upcoming expirations of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and create or expand other tax provisions designed to boost domestic investment.
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The pandemic precipitated the steepest decline in economic output and employment in recent history, which is leading to a drop in tax revenue. At the same time, the federal response to the crisis is producing a large increase in spending. This combination will cause the federal budget deficit to spike.
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The House Republican Study Committee released a proposal, “Reclaiming the American Dream,” which includes 118 policy recommendations to address education, labor, and welfare policy with the aim of expanding opportunity, liberty, and free enterprise for all Americans.
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Broad themes of the president’s agenda include providing tax relief to individuals and tax credits to businesses that engage in desired activities, while the status of expiring TCJA provisions and tariffs seems uncertain.
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Biden’s tax vision is twofold: higher taxes on high-income earners and businesses paired with more generous provisions for specific activities and households.
4 min readTax treatment can affect investment decisions. Extending expensing treatment (full and immediate deductions) to all forms of capital investment, human and physical, would help facilitate sustainable long-run economic growth.
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Housing affordability was a major issue even before the COVID-19 crisis, but the current economic situation has made it more salient. Immediate support for people struggling makes sense now, but lawmakers should also consider long-term solutions to the problem of high rents, namely by expanding the supply of housing.
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Senators Ted Cruz and Martha McSally introduced the CREATE JOBS Act that would make two significant changes to incentivize investment in the United States.
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Rather than limit improvements to certain sectors, lawmakers could pursue a broader policy of full expensing for all capital investment and neutral cost recovery for structures and clear the tax policy hurdles that currently stand in the way of private investment.
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Cost recovery is the way the tax code permits firms to recover (or deduct) the cost of making investments. Cost recovery plays an important role in defining a business’ taxable income and can impact investment decisions.
We estimate that moving to permanent full expensing and neutral cost recovery for structures would add more than 1 million full-time equivalent jobs to the long-run economy and boost the long-run capital stock by $4.8 trillion.
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