Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP)

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561 posts
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Trump Administration’s English-Only IRS Would Undermine Public Trust and Boost Budget Deficits

• By Matthew Gardner

The Trump administration’s push to make English the official U.S. language threatens decades of progress in taxpayer services for non-English speakers, risking cuts to IRS multilingual support, harder tax filing, lower compliance, and an undermined agency mission.

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Trump’s Tax Law Clobbers State Budgets. Now’s the Time to Prepare.

• By ITEP Staff

The Trump megabill hands the richest 1% a trillion-dollar windfall while gutting funding for health care, education, and disaster relief — leaving communities to pick up the pieces. State and local leaders must step up, tax the wealthiest fairly, and safeguard the essentials that keep America healthy, educated, and safe.

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Trump’s Firing of BLS Commissioner is Part of Larger Erosion of Federal Data Infrastructure

• By Emma Sifre

Last week, President Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in apparent retaliation for weak jobs numbers. The move drew sharp criticism for spooking investors and weakening trust in official data. But it also reflects a deeper problem: the ongoing erosion of the federal data infrastructure.

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Excessive CEO Pay Makes Inequality Worse. Shareholders and the Public Deserve to Know About Compensation Disparities

• By Matthew Gardner

Huge executive pay packages are a prime driver of income inequality. Shareholders and the public deserve to know about how CEOs are compensated, but new SEC leadership seems to think otherwise.

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Americans Want to Know Which Corporations Aren’t Paying Taxes, but House Republicans Want to Keep this Information Secret

• By Matthew Gardner

The appropriations plan released by House Republicans this weekend threatens to withhold funding for an obscure but vital financial oversight board because that board now requires corporations to disclose basic information about their income tax payments (or lack thereof).

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June Budget Report Doesn’t Erase Our Nation’s Fiscal Challenges

• By Joe Hughes

Nobody should be too excited and think this means our country is headed toward lower deficits - especially when the administration recently signed one of the most expensive budget reconciliation bills in history.

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How Much Would Every Family in Every State Get if the Megabill’s Tax Cuts Given to the Rich Had Instead Been Evenly Divided?

• By Michael Ettlinger

If instead of giving $117 billion to the richest 1 percent, that money had been evenly divided among all Americans, we'd each get $343 - or nearly $1,400 for a family of four.

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GOP Megabill Breaks America’s Promise to Future Generations

• By Amy Hanauer

This country’s biggest historical challenge has been delivering this progress to all Americans, but Republicans have cut it back for everyone, retreating from many 20th century achievements in ways that will slam doors, rather than opening them, for the next generation.

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10 Crazy Comparisons Showing How Much Trump and Congress Just Cut Taxes for the Rich

• By ITEP Staff

$117 billion is a big number, so we thought it could use a little context.

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Top 1% to Receive $1 Trillion Tax Cut from Trump Megabill Over the Next Decade

• By Carl Davis

The Trump megabill will give the top 1 percent tax cuts totaling $1.02 trillion over the next decade. For comparison, the bill’s cuts to the Medicaid health care program will total $930 billion over the same period.

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The SALT Caucus, Fortunately, Comes Up Short

• By Michael Ettlinger

The endlessly debated cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) has emerged in the GOP megabill largely unscathed—despite the efforts of Republican lawmakers from “blue” states. Those lawmakers are correct that the cap reduces the bill’s tax cuts for their wealthy constituents more than for those in other states. The megabill, however, is so loaded up with other provisions that result in a dramatic tax cut for the richest 1 percent in every…

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Megabill Takes Cap Off Unprecedented Private School Voucher Tax Credit, Potentially Raising Cost by Tens of Billions Relative to Earlier Version

• By Carl Davis

It is clear that this tax credit has the potential to come with an enormous cost if private school groups are successful in convincing their supporters to participate. In these times of very high debt and deficits, this is reason for all of us to be uneasy.

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Trump Megabill Will Give $117 Billion in Tax Cuts to the Top 1% in 2026. How Much In Your State?

• By Michael Ettlinger

The predominant feature of the tax and spending bill working its way through Congress is a massive tax cut for the richest 1 percent — a $114 billion benefit to the wealthiest people in the country in 2026 alone.

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How Much Do the Top 1% in Each State Get from the Trump Megabill?

• By Carl Davis

The Senate tax bill under debate right now would bring very large tax cuts to very high-income people. In total, the richest 1 percent would receive $114 billion in tax cuts next year alone. That would amount to nearly $61,000 for each of these affluent households.

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Senate Republicans Rig the Rules to Make Their Tax Bill Look Responsible. It’s Not.

• By Jon Whiten, Steve Wamhoff

No matter how much Senate leadership bends the rules to make their tax cuts look better on paper, the cost and impact on the deficit remains the same under a current policy baseline. It’s a move meant to mask the true cost and push a reckless bill through.

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The ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill Creates a $5 Billion Tax Shelter for Private School Donors

• By Amy Hanauer

On May 22, Congress passed the House reconciliation bill or “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” by a one-vote margin. The bill’s dozens of destructive tax provisions would supercharge inequality and force devastating cuts to health and food aid that have been bedrocks of the American safety net since the 1960s.

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Musk-Trump Feud Shows Need to Tax the Rich

• By Amy Hanauer

Our tax policies enable people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump to accumulate more wealth than anyone could ever use in a lifetime. They then use it to steer elections and shape public policy to further enrich themselves and others like them. We should defeat the enormously destructive tax bill in Congress and instead craft tax policy that taxes the rich, makes our democracy more fair, and returns resources to the rest of the country.

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House Bill’s $164 Billion Giveaway to Multinational Corporations Puts America Last

• By Sarah Austin

The House of Representatives’ recently passed tax bill changes course on taxing multinational corporations engaged in shifting U.S. profits overseas, offering massive tax giveaways that weaken American revenues and risk sending more American corporate investment offshore.

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The House Tax Plan, By the Numbers

• By Carl Davis

The House of Representatives unveiled a sprawling piece of tax legislation earlier this week that would extend temporary tax changes enacted in 2017 and layer various kinds of tax cuts and increases on top. The JCT analysis makes clear that the House tax plan would be regressive, meaning it would offer larger tax cuts as a share of income to high-income taxpayers than to either middle-class or working-class families. It also makes clear that most…

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Trump Megabill Will Encourage Dynastic Wealth Hoarding by Further Weakening the Estate Tax

• By Jon Whiten

The tax and spending megabill signed into law by President Trump on July 4 will cut nearly $200 billion from food assistance, affecting tens of millions adults and children, while providing an estate tax cut costing roughly the same amount to a few thousand people who will leave behind more than $7 million to their heirs.

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Trump’s Proposed Higher Tax Rate on the Richest Taxpayers Would Affect Very Little of Their Income

• By Carl Davis, Steve Wamhoff

President Donald Trump has proposed allowing the top rate to revert from 37 percent to 39.6 percent for taxable income greater than $5 million for married couples and $2.5 million for unmarried taxpayers. But many other special breaks in the tax code would ensure that most income of very well-off people would never be subject to Trump’s 39.6 percent tax rate.

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America Has Left the Building: U.S. Loses from Our Global Tax Policy Choices, Others Could Gain

• By Amy Hanauer

Countries that once looked to the U.S. for direction on tax policy have concluded they need to form alliances without us. If so, it will often be to the benefit of other people around the globe and to the deficit of U.S. communities.

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Millions of Citizen Children Would be Harmed by Proposal Billed as Targeting Immigrant Tax Filers

• By Emma Sifre, Joe Hughes

Congressional Republicans have floated a proposal to strip the Child Tax Credit from millions of children who are U.S. citizens and legal residents in situations where their parents do not have Social Security numbers. Approximately 4.5 million citizen children with Social Security numbers would lose access to the credit under this proposal.

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The Impact of Trump’s Tariffs

• By ITEP Staff

The tariffs proposed by Donald Trump, which are far larger than any on the books today, would significantly raise the prices faced by American consumers across the income scale.

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Ending Direct File Program is a Gift to the Tax-Prep Industry That Will Cost Taxpayers Time and Money

• By Jon Whiten

The Trump administration reportedly plans to shutter the IRS Direct File program before it has a chance to get fully off the ground, taking away a free option for people to file their tax returns directly to the agency. Ending Direct File is another gift from this administration to large corporations, this time to the multibillion-dollar tax prep industry that profits from you filing your taxes.