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For years, wealth and income inequality have been widening at a troubling pace. A recent study estimated that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans held 42 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2012, up from 28 percent in 1989. Public policies have exacerbated this trend by taxing income earned from investments at a lower rate than income from an ordinary job and by dramatically cutting taxes on inherited wealth. Further, lawmakers have done little to stop aggressive accounting schemes designed to avoid the estate tax altogether.

The federal estate tax is one of our most progressive sources of revenue and a critical tool in the fight against rising wealth inequality. Congressional legislation has significantly eroded the tax over the years, and now it is levied on only the wealthiest 0.2% of estates, meaning that 99.8% of estates will have no federal estate tax liability. The estate tax should be not only preserved but restored to a historical level to increase revenues and ensure more progressivity in the tax system.

In his acceptance speech, President-elect Donald Trump placed a heavy emphasis on the need to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. In theory, expanded investments in our nation’s infrastructure could generate wide support among the public and within Congress. And yet Congressional negotiations on this issue have repeatedly broken down because of disagreements over how to fund those investments. Unfortunately, a flawed proposal for new funding put forth by Mr. Trump fails to offer a realistic path forward.

State governments provide a wide array of tax breaks for their elderly residents. Almost every state that levies an income tax allows some form of income tax exemption or credit for citizens over age 65 that is unavailable to non-elderly taxpayers. Most states also provide special property tax breaks to the elderly. Unfortunately, too many of these breaks are poorly-targeted, unsustainable, and unfair. This policy brief surveys federal and state approaches to reducing taxes for older adults and suggests options for designing less costly and better targeted tax breaks.

Corporations falsely claim that they have to engage in offshore tax avoidance maneuvers because the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high, an argument which has unfortunately found an audience in lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In 2017, Congress likely will evaluate a number of approaches to taxing the trillions of dollars corporations currently hold offshore. This report explains and evaluates these proposals, including a so-called repatriation holiday and deemed repatriation. Further, it explains why ending deferral of taxes on U.S. multinational corporations’ foreign earnings could halt the widespread corporate practice of funneling money to subsidiaries for the express purpose of avoiding taxes.

Fortune 500 corporations collectively have stashed $2.5 trillion in profits offshore, on which they have avoided up to $718 billion in taxes. It’s no wonder that policymakers on both sides of the aisle are weighing legislative options to either tax these profits or create an incentive for corporations to “repatriate” or bring these profits to the United States so that they are subject to taxation.

Lawmakers have introduced several “repatriation” proposals that would glean tax revenue from these offshore profits. But the only solution that will ensure corporations pay taxes on their offshore profits AND shut down the practice of stashing cash offshore is to end deferral, the tax code loophole that allows corporations to indefinitely avoid paying taxes on profits stashed offshore.

Retail trade has been transformed by the Internet. As the popularity of “e-commerce” (that is, transactions conducted over the Internet) has grown, policymakers have engaged in a heated debate over how state and local sales taxes should be applied to these transactions. This debate is of critical importance for states as sales taxes comprise close to one-third of all state tax revenues and hundreds of billions of dollars in retail spending is now occurring online.

Chart comparing House GOP Tax Plan, Trump’s Initial Tax Proposal and Trump’s Revised Tax Proposal.

The concept of taxing sodas and other sugary beverages has gained traction recently across the United States and around the world. The World Health Organization officially recommended a tax on sugar sweetened beverages as a way to battle the obesity epidemic. In the US, multiple states and localities have looked to taxes on sugar sweetened beverages as a way to improve public health and increase revenue. In 2014, Berkeley, California became the first U.S. locality to enact such a tax. In 2016, similar taxes were enacted in Boulder, Colorado; Albany, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; Cook County, Illinois; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Efforts to increase taxes usually face some opposition, particularly increases to broad-based taxes such as the sales or income tax. Yet in many states, lawmakers have been able to agree on one approach to revenue-raising: the cigarette tax. Since 2002, nearly every state has enacted a cigarette tax in-crease to fund health care, discourage smoking, or to help balance state budgets. This policy brief looks at the advantages and disadvantages of cigarette taxes, and cigarette tax increases, as a source of state and local revenue.