National Tax Journal articles from September 2006

National Tax Journal archives from September 2006

A tale of two tax cuts, a wage squeeze, and a tax credit.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The past five years have seen a series of major federal tax cuts instigated and implemented by President Bush and Republican majorities in Congress. The cumulative effect of these policy changes has been to reduce actual and...

Public ignorance and estate tax repeal: the effect of partisan differences and survey incentives.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION In 2001, Congress passed and President Bush signed several tax cut bills. One target of this legislation was the federal estate tax. Prior to passage of the 2001 bills, the tax applied to inheritances of more than $1 million...

Public opinion and the push to repeal the estate tax.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION We examine here the impact of public opinion on legislative outcomes in the surprising case of the repeal of the federal estate tax in 2001. This repeal benefits only a tiny minority of very wealthy Americans: those...

Health savings accounts: implications for health spending.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Health expenditures in the United States have increased rapidly over the past several decades and promise to continue growing at least as quickly for the foreseeable future. Health spending as a share of GDP has risen from...

Is there a right way to promote health insurance through the tax system?
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The private health insurance system in the U.S. has been erected on a foundation of tax incentives that promote employment-based coverage over the individual purchase of insurance. In 2006, persons taking advantage of tax...

Two wrongs do not make a right.(tax treatment of health insurance )
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Several recent health policy proposals have started with the premise, originally analyzed by Feldstein (1973), that the existing tax treatment of health insurance introduces major distortions that lead to inefficient levels of...

Floors, ceilings, and opening the door for a non-itemizer deduction.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Recent tax proposals would combine the extension of the charitable deduction to non-itemizers with a common floor under the charitable deductions of all taxpayers. For example, the recent Final Report of the President's...

Regulation of political organizations and the red herring of tax exempt status.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION political activity by exempt organizations is much in the news. The 2004 presidential election cycle introduced the electorate to ACT (Americans Coming Together), Moveon. org, and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, all political...

Katrina/Rita: the ultimate test for tax policy?
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast region causing significant damage in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and, two days after the hurricane, levees protecting New Orleans were topped/breached...

Tax policy and the fiscal cost of disasters: NY and 9/11.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION When two hijacked Boeing 767 aircraft struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001 and caused them to collapse, New York City suffered an enormous and horrifying blow. In this paper, we...

Five things an economist thinks are important in analyzing the domestic production deduction: what accountants and lawyers should know about economists.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION This paper provides the perspective of an economist to an ongoing dialogue regarding how economists, accountants and attorneys can learn from one another and, thus, improve their analysis of tax policy issues. To narrow and...

Five things economists and lawyers can learn from accountants: an illustration using the domestic production activities deduction.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Accounting is often referred to as the "language of business." In addition to providing a language, it is also akin to a translation program. The corporation uses accounting principles and rules to aggregate all of the year's...

Multidisciplinary issues in corporate tax policy.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The papers by McClelland (2006) and Mills (2006), together with the presentation by Potter (2006), highlight the difficulties that analysts and researchers face when trying to design, model, and eventually administer, changes...

Distortions from partial tax reform revealed through effective tax rates.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION In a competitive economy, rates of return on investments direct profit-maximizing savers to invest in projects with the highest social return. Output is maximized when marginal rates of return are equalized across all...

Horizontal equity and family tax treatment: the orphan child of tax policy.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION There is a good chance that the "Brady Bunch" would not pay income taxes even though they have the wherewithal to hire a housekeeper. The exempt level for a married couple with six children who itemize deductions at a rate of...

Partial loss refundability: how are corporate tax losses used?
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The asymmetric treatment of tax losses is an attribute common to all corporate income tax systems. If a corporation s income exceeds allowable deductions, then its net income is taxed at the statutory rate. However, if the...

Containing the individual burden of property taxes: a case study of circuit breaker expansion in Maine.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Over the past several years, the burden of local property taxes has become a topic of widespread discussion and concern among Maine residents. It has led to calls for legislative action, citizen referenda, consideration of tax...

Property tax limitations: an interpretative review.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION As of 2006, only five of the 48 states in the continental United States have absolutely no explicit limits on some aspect of property taxation. The remaining 43 states each have at least one of the three most common...

The property tax bound.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The property tax in the United States has not withered away as many observers predicted and some hoped. In fact, it has remained a remarkably resilient component of state and local revenue systems. However, rather than a...

Illinois response to rising residential property values: an assessment growth cap in Cook County.
September 1, 2006... CONTEXT Between 1996 and 2005, house prices nationwide increased by 45 percent after adjusting for inflation (Baker, 2005). This created more than $5 trillion in housing wealth, which led to greatly expanded property tax bases nationwide....

Property tax policy responses to rapidly rising home values: District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION In recent years, housing values have risen rapidly in many areas. Typically, high rates of increase have not been sustained over a long period of time. (1) Nonetheless, rapid increases in value--when translated into higher...

Full disclosure: controlling property tax increases during periods of increasing housing values.
September 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Cycles in the market value of residential real estate are common in the United States (Smith and Tesarek, 1991; Brueggeman, 2005), but home values tend to go up fairly consistently over time. (1) Increases in residential...