On Thursday morning at AEI, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) gave remarks on the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He discussed the impact of the new tax plan and what it means for the American economy moving forward.
The Washington Post reports that the U.S. deficit is headed to $1 trillion this year, the highest level since 2012. Republicans were furious about the large deficits under President Obama while he sought little to no spending constraint, but recently their focus has been elsewhere. How can we steer the fiscal outlook back toward sanity? As I see it, there are two options.
“What’s, unfortunately, unique in West Virginia, it’s not so much the rates of addiction, it’s the rates of death,” said Alex Brill, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “What’s most concerning is the high rate of opioid-related deaths.”
This report investigates the impact of a revenue-neutral carbon tax whereby revenues raised from a $25/ton carbon tax are used to reduce the tax rate on wage income by a commensurate amount. Recognizing that such a reform is not revenue-neutral for every single taxpayer, nor even revenue-neutral in every county, we investigate the degree of spatial variation across all counties and sort results by the historical partisan preferences of those counties.
Republican lawmakers who oppose a carbon tax are usually motivated by a belief that their constituents will get a raw deal. But standard political commentary on carbon taxation focuses on the higher costs for goods such as gasoline and electricity. Looking at who wins and who loses from a revenue-neutral carbon tax — one that also cuts existing taxes on work — yields a very different answer.
