On Revenue Losses from Extending Bush Tax Cuts up to $1 Million: That’s JCT’s Projection, Not Ours

We issued a paper yesterday in which we noted that extending President Bush’s income tax cuts for households making up to $1 million a year is projected to lose nearly half of the revenue that President Obama’s proposal to extend the tax cuts only for households making up to $250,000 would raise.

Some news reports, such as this one, have mistakenly suggested that the projection we cited of the lost revenue from this proposal compared to Obama’s — a loss of $366 billion over the coming decade, or 44 percent — is a Center on Budget projection. In fact, the estimate comes from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which is Congress’ official scorekeeper on tax legislation.  It is JCT’s estimate of the revenue loss of extending the Bush tax cuts on the first $1 million of a tax filer’s income — and ending the tax cuts on income above that — rather than of extending the tax cuts only on the first $250,000 of income as Obama has proposed.