“The House bill and the Senate bill are not identical but are very much on the same page, according to Alex Brill, a resident fellow at AEI, a conservative think tank. Most changes will be technical in nature and carried out by the conference committee. According to Brill, reconciliation might take longer than lawmakers have predicted, but he is confident that the differences will ultimately get resolved.”
“[Alex] Brill explained that it might be the right moment for tax reform. He expected a bipartisan bill to emerge early next year to serve as the latest in a cycle of tax policies that should help stimulate the US economy, but added that he isn’t holding his breath. “It’s been 31 years since lawmakers did something called tax reform,” Brill said.”
“Writing in The Hill, Alex Brill of the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimated that repealing the deduction could help subsidize major parts of the tax plan, including the proposed tax cut for top filers and the expansion of the standard deduction. As Brill wrote, that could mean a cap on how much of a filer’s income could be eligible for the deduction.”
On the other hand, the SALT deduction incentivizes higher state and local spending and doesn’t have the great distributional implications, as my colleague Alex Brill carefully explains here. I could probably go either way on this one.
“The tax benefit provided $338 billion in deductions in 2015, making it the most widely claimed itemized deduction that year, according to the most recently available IRS statistics. Fully repealing it would raise $1.4 trillion in revenue over a decade, according to an estimate by Alex Brill of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.”
“[Alex] Brill estimated that of all the money saved by local and state taxpayers with this deduction, 89 percent comes from those with incomes of $100,000 or higher. “In other words, the policy itself is highly regressive,” Brill told the Senate Finance Committee in prepared testimony Sept. 14. “It is available only to the minority of taxpayers who itemize their taxes (generally higher-income taxpayers) and is more valuable to taxpayers in higher tax brackets.””
Back in 2012, my AEI colleague Alex Brill wrote about the wisdom of combining internet sales taxes with income-tax base broadening. Back then, Congress was considering legislation, the Marketplace Equity Act, that would have permitted states to collect the sales tax they are owed when their residents purchase goods online from out-of-state sellers.
“[Alex] Brill said that the good news was that the clinical evidence clearly indicated that e-cigarettes were less risky substitutes for conventional cigarettes.
‘Given that a core objective of the European Commission Tobacco Products Directive is to ensure “a high level of health protection for European citizens”, the proper tax to levy on e-cigarettes should be self-evident: none,’ he wrote.”
In an ambitious new report released today, the National Academy of Social Insurance provides detailed, evidence-based analyses on a range of policy options for modernizing the nation’s social insurance system.
“Using…open-source models, Brill found that doubling the standard deduction and expanding the 10 percent rate would each result in a tax cut for about 75 million middle-class Americans. Expanding the 15 percent rate would give about 30 million of them a tax cut. That’s a big gap. Expanding the 15 percent bracket, though, would deliver more than twice the added economic growth of the other options, Brill’s models projected, by incentivizing far more additional work and investment in the economy.”