The Biden administration is proposing a new tax on households worth more than $100 million. Tagged as a “billionaire tax,” the new levy would apply not just to ordinary income, but also to unrealized capital gains. If a wealthy person owns shares of stock and the stock is worth more today than when it was purchased, Biden wants the federal government to take 20 percent of the increase. So, what’s wrong with that?
Review of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe, by Josh Mitchell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021) 261 pp.
Joe Biden says that corporations aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. He also says his plan to raise corporate taxes won’t harm anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year. Virtually all economists know these statements are false. Yet, John Goodman thinks there has ever been a time in recent history when there has been such a large gap between what economists know and what politicians say.
Because of lower taxes and higher wages, the average Georgia household will enjoy more than $39,000 in economic benefits over their lifetime thanks to the 2017 federal tax cuts. That’s the conclusion of a Goodman Institute study by Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff. An earlier study by Kotlikoff and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta , also partly funded by the Goodman Institute, estimated the gain at $22,676 because of personal income tax cuts. The new study adds the impact of lower corporate taxes.
One of the intellectual architects of the 2017 tax cut legislation says the Joe Biden proposal to reimpose higher tax rates will be harmful to the economy and to working families. Earlier studies by Boston University professor Lawrence Kotlikoff and his colleagues found that “the United states had one for the highest corporate tax rates in the world.” As a result of lowering the top corporate rate from 35% to 21%, the US became competitive and more than $1 trillion has been repatriated by US firms. In a new study, Kotlikoff finds that the Biden proposal to undo half the cut in the corporate income tax rate will lower wages and cost jobs.
Like other economic estimates of the Biden economic plan, the Kotlikoff analysis finds that the impact on 80 percent of the population is a small, positive number, averaging only a few hundred dollars a year.
Vice President Biden is proposing major changes to the federal personal income tax, Social Security’s payroll (FICA) tax, the federal corporate income tax, and Social Security’s benefit provisions
We need to remove the most unfair, most anti-work, most anti-saving provisions of the tax code – ones that burden the middle-class. These include a social Security earnings penalty that can push senior workers into a 95% marginal tax rate, a tax on nonsocial security income that even hits tax-exempt bonds, and unfair restrictions on part-time workers and the self-employed.
The Federal Reserve System is paying banks not to lend money under an Obama era policy.
The Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) is a detailed life-cycle consumption-smoothing program that projects income, taxes and spending for people of different ages and wealth levels.