Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Fiscal Cliff: Congressional Research Study Had This All Figured Out Weeks Ago

January 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Amid holiday clamor over the politics of the so-called "fiscal cliff," Thomas L. Hungerford must be off somewhere shaking his head. Hungerford, whose byline identifies him as a specialist in public finance, authored a Congressional Research Service report on taxes that came out in mid-December, just a few weeks before the "cliff" kerfuffle started. Taxes and the Economy: an Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945 (Updated) is, perhaps, not a title that makes one want to dive right in. But the obscurity of Hungerford's text is telling, insofar as his conclusions don't seem likely to land the ... Read More

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The Game Done Changed, Governor Brown

November 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Election Day is tomorrow, and Prop 30, a California ballot initiative notable for its tax hike on the wealthy to fund education, is hanging by a thread if recent polls are any indication. This is a huge deal, given the budget cuts the state will face without additional revenue. For the measure’s supporters, it must have been frustrating to read California Governor Jerry Brown’s butt-covering maneuvers (he's championing the initiative) in the New York Times yesterday: The money is needed for schools. I don’t want people to wake up the day after the election and say, ‘Why didn’t ... Read More

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A Simple Way to Get Conservatives to Support Higher Taxes on the Rich

October 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

It is a fundamental fault line of contemporary American politics: Republicans adamantly oppose higher taxes on the wealthy, while Democrats consider such taxes a moral and fiscal imperative. This disagreement plays a central role in the election campaign, and it threatens to derail any deal to cut the deficit. But conservative opinion on this issue may be more malleable than anyone realizes. Newly published research suggests that, for those on the right, support for this specific form of wealth redistribution depends on how the issue is framed. Writing in the journal Psychological ... Read More

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Romney’s Income Tax Rhetoric Misleading

September 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The video that emerged late Monday in which Mitt Romney notes that 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes begs to be put into context. Fortunately, the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has done just that in an updated report. That 47 percent figure has become a talking point among some right-wing thinkers, symbolizing what they see as a society dangerously split between "makers" and "takers." Needless to say, they consider themselves among the "makers," while the "takers" are people who rely on government assistance to meet their basic needs. If you accept ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The 101
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Taxes: Prop 13′s Eternal Shadow

August 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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THE ISSUE: Californians have battled over taxes since the passage of the property tax-limiting Proposition 13 in 1978; ever since, the state and its voters have built taxes on that system, creating the most centralized, complicated system of raising revenue of any American state. That system has, for a variety of reasons, made it hard for the state to balance its budget in the short term, or to make major policy plans for the long term. THE BACKSTORY: The Think Long committee considered altering Prop 13 and its property tax measures, but the topic was too difficult. The more-conservative ... Read More

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Ten Thousand “One-Percenters” Pay Zero Income Tax

May 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

No less an authority than the Internal Revenue Service reports that at least 10,080 households with gross incomes of over $200,000 paid nothing at all in income taxes in 2009. (OK, that doesn't literally put them all in the top 1 percent, but pretty close.) Those high earners are not (necessarily) breaking any laws—just taking clever advantage of a panoply of tax deductions. They're also ducking the alternative minimum tax, which, as Bloomberg explains, "was created in 1969 in response to a report that 155 people earned $200,000 and paid nothing in taxes." The horror. Interestingly, ... Read More

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Grover Norquist’s Proposal to Raise Taxes

May 2, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Recently, in an interview with Ira Glass on This American Life, Grover Norquist — the famed founder of Americans for Tax Reform, and organizer of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which asks political candidates across the United States to commit themselves in writing to oppose any and all increases in taxes — argued that one of the most fundamental reforms necessary to shrink the size of government is to move all state and local government employees from publically funded pension systems to 401(k) plans. At this point, the problem with state and local government pensions is not a matter ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2012
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Paying Taxes Makes You Feel Good

April 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Isn’t paying taxes annoying? Doesn’t it feel like you’re flushing your hard-earned money down the toilet? A scholarly paper published just in time for the U.S. tax season suggests the answers are yes, and no, respectively. “People would prefer to keep a dollar than pay it in tax,” the researchers write in the Journal of Economic Psychology, “but paying it in tax is not equivalent to throwing the money away.” They argue that while we’d rather use the money to buy a flat-screen TV or take a vacation, we do derive some benefit from forking over cash to the government. ... Read More

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Don’t Tax Soda, Tax Sweeteners

December 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Public-health officials and policymakers across the United States have been talking a lot lately about tackling the epidemic of obesity through smaller nudges like a per-ounce tax on soda. Not surprisingly, as enthusiasm for this idea expands, so too has soda-tax scholarship. “Our take on this was basically that everybody is talking about a soda tax, so we stepped back and said, ‘Wait a minute, this is not very well targeted,’” said John Beghin, an economist at Iowa State University. “If you want to impose a tax and reduce calorie intake from sweeteners, there is a better way to ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
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Mortgage Interest Deduction on the Chopping Block?

July 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

There was a rare sight in debt-ceiling-obsessed Washington on Thursday afternoon at the Urban Institute: Liberals and libertarians were agreeing on a controversial and politically ugly policy proposal. The home mortgage interest deduction, a sacred cow of the tax code that allows homeowners to write off a chunk of their monthly mortgage payments, must be wound down. Economists with the libertarian Reason Foundation, the progressive Center for American Progress, and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center all concluded as much. Even a quick glance at the numbers reveals that this tax ... Read More

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