I know the tax cuts are expiring in 2025 so I did a quick Google search and thought this report was informative. The Brookings Institute is variously labeled as nonpartisan, liberal, conservative.
I know the tax cuts are expiring in 2025 so I did a quick Google search and thought this report was informative. The Brookings Institute is variously labeled as nonpartisan, liberal, conservative.
The Brookings piece gave a lot of topline numbers, but did not answer the questions I had as an economist, so I looked elsewhere. The key thing I wanted to refresh my memory on was which parts of the 2018 reform were permanent. As I suspected, the corporate tax reform was permanent, while the personal income tax rate cuts expire.
My biggest frustration over Democrats' tax rhetoric is that they always conflate corporations with "the rich", even though about 60% of US households own stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds and retirement accounts, and 37% of all US stock ownership is in retirement accounts. Cutting the corporate tax rate helped to shore up a lot of government and union pension funds. Raising the corporate tax rate might make for good populist rhetoric, but it's bad policy.
I would be happy to see all of the cuts to the personal income tax expire. They were unneeded, and they add to the deficit. But neither party wants to just let them expire. Biden wants to preserve them for every household making less then $400,000. We will never balance the budget by taxing only the rich. We need an anti-populist party that will tell voters the truth, unlike the Democrats and Republicans, and force voters to choose between higher taxes and dramatic reductions in popular programs, instead of pretending that federal largesse is free.
A lot of rich people do not pay taxes. But raising tax rates does NOTHING to change that. When you raise tax rates, you extract more revenue from the people who are already paying their share. If you want to get revenue from tax shirkers, you have to close their loopholes and tax shelters.
Thank you again for your professional knowledge and perspective. Let’s hope we all survive the trump insanity so we can return again to informed political differences and productive compromises!
Thank you for the clarification!
I know the tax cuts are expiring in 2025 so I did a quick Google search and thought this report was informative. The Brookings Institute is variously labeled as nonpartisan, liberal, conservative.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-will-happen-to-the-trump-tax-cuts-in-2025-and-how-will-they-affect-the-national-debt/
The Brookings piece gave a lot of topline numbers, but did not answer the questions I had as an economist, so I looked elsewhere. The key thing I wanted to refresh my memory on was which parts of the 2018 reform were permanent. As I suspected, the corporate tax reform was permanent, while the personal income tax rate cuts expire.
My biggest frustration over Democrats' tax rhetoric is that they always conflate corporations with "the rich", even though about 60% of US households own stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds and retirement accounts, and 37% of all US stock ownership is in retirement accounts. Cutting the corporate tax rate helped to shore up a lot of government and union pension funds. Raising the corporate tax rate might make for good populist rhetoric, but it's bad policy.
I would be happy to see all of the cuts to the personal income tax expire. They were unneeded, and they add to the deficit. But neither party wants to just let them expire. Biden wants to preserve them for every household making less then $400,000. We will never balance the budget by taxing only the rich. We need an anti-populist party that will tell voters the truth, unlike the Democrats and Republicans, and force voters to choose between higher taxes and dramatic reductions in popular programs, instead of pretending that federal largesse is free.
A lot of rich people do not pay taxes. But raising tax rates does NOTHING to change that. When you raise tax rates, you extract more revenue from the people who are already paying their share. If you want to get revenue from tax shirkers, you have to close their loopholes and tax shelters.
Thank you again for your professional knowledge and perspective. Let’s hope we all survive the trump insanity so we can return again to informed political differences and productive compromises!