S ESOPs, which are defined contribution retirement plans that allow employees to become owners, are increasingly popular in the US…. S ESOPs exist across a wide spectrum of industries and include a meaningful number of US employees. As the US seeks to rebound from a period of tepid productivity growth, tools such as S ESOPs can improve worker commitment, reduce worker turnover, and lower production costs.
“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.”
Middle-class tax relief has widespread support across the political spectrum, but the consequences of different strategies for achieving this goal are not well understood. The analysis finds that either doubling the standard deduction or expanding the brackets for the 10 or 15 percent tax rates have quite different effects both within the middle class and across the aggregate economy.
