off the charts
POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
Howard Gleckman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center has a mostly positive take on former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin’s proposed four-step path to tax reform. Those steps (as Gleckman describes them) are, in order:
- Recognize that the U.S. will have a progressive tax code.
- Agree on a top rate.
- Agree on how much revenue you want to raise.
- Eliminate or scale back the tax preferences you need to accomplish the first three.
- Let the Bush tax cuts aimed at households making over $250,000 expire on schedule, locking in nearly $1 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years.
- Seek agreement on how much additional revenue to provide, alongside significant spending cuts, as part of a balanced deficit-reduction package.
- Seek agreement on the specific tax-policy changes needed to raise this revenue while maintaining or improving tax progressivity.
- Consider reducing tax rates below their scheduled levels under current law only if policymakers can generate enough revenue from cutting tax preferences to meet their revenue target without gimmicks and in a way that will last.
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