Nothing is sure in life but death, taxes, and fighting over the IRS budget. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) boosted the IRS’s funding by nearly $80 billion over a decade, but Congress quickly, ...

Tax expenditures make up a substantial part of the federal budget. Some of them are larger than the entire budgets of the programs or departments that spend money for the same or related purposes. For ...

Fines, fees, and forfeitures are financial penalties imposed for violations of the law. State and local governments collected a combined $13 billion in revenue from fines, fees, and forfeitures in ...

Income inequality has increased sharply over the past 40 years. A simple way to measure inequality is by looking at the share of income received by the highest-income people. Using a broad measure ...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act nearly doubled the standard deduction and eliminated or restricted many itemized deductions in 2018 through 2025. It also eliminated the “Pease” limitation on itemized ...

Average tax rates measure tax burden, while marginal tax rates measure the impact of taxes on incentives to earn, save, invest, or spend an additional dollar. The average tax rate is the total amount ...

Tax-favored retirement arrangements can be sliced and diced in various ways. There are three big differences, though: who sponsors them, who bears the risk, and when Uncle Sam takes his cut. There are ...

Tax expenditures for retirement savings are very large. They were over $300 billion in 2022 and will likely exceed $2 trillion over the 2022-2026 period. Tax expenditures are revenue losses ...

Total US tax revenue equaled 27 percent of gross domestic product, well below the 34 percent weighted average for the other 37 OECD countries. US taxes are low relative to those in other high-income ...

State and local governments collected a combined $4.1 trillion of general revenues in fiscal year 2021, from a mix of income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, charges for specific government ...

Before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) primarily affected well-off households, but not those with the very highest incomes. It was also more likely ...

Pass-through businesses are not subject to an entity-level tax; instead, profits flow through to owners and are taxed under the individual income tax. Some pass-through income is eligible for a 20 ...