Tax Day came and went on April 18th with the regular tax filing deadline, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is facing difficulties. It struggled to manage a deluge of 282 million calls made in fiscal year 2021, only answering 11 percent, and a backlog of several million returns from 2021 were left to be […]
As the deadline for the 2022 tax filing season nears, the IRS faces scrutiny for its backlog of returns, inaccessible taxpayer service, and delays in issuing certain refunds. As of January 28th, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had 23.7 million returns awaiting action, compared to a typical backlog at that point of roughly 1 million […]
Key Findings The waning pandemic and robust economic recovery have come with many benefits—plentiful jobs and fast-growing (nominal) incomes—but also serious challenges such as high and rising inflation. Rather than pushing for more fiscal stimulus or leaving it to the Federal Reserve to handle inflation through higher interest rates, policymakers should focus on boosting the […]
A key theme of our Options for Reforming America’s Tax Code 2.0 is that tax policy is a matter of trade-offs. For example, expanding the generosity of tax credits for lower-income individuals can help make the tax code more progressive, but it also reduces federal revenue. Pairing a credit expansion with a tax offset may […]
Our new book Options for Reforming America’s Tax Code 2.0 models several tax proposals that would help low-income taxpayers with little impact on overall economic growth. Here we take a closer look at the most extensive of these proposals: restructuring the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) based on the Family […]