Category Archives: Policy Issues

The estate tax is similar to the standard gift tax, but is levied when a rich person dies and passes their estate on to their family.  Conservatives call this the “death tax” and have fought it for decades.  Conservatives have characterized the estate tax as an unfair double tax that hits millions of estates and forces families to sell their farms. The fact is that the estate tax hits a very tiny minority of estates.  Yet this fact has never prevented conservatives from misleading everyone from small business owners to small farmers into thinking that it’s an issue that will impact … Continue reading this post →

Conservatives consistently make the claim that tax rates in the US are among the highest in the world.  As evidence, they point to the top tax bracket, or “corporate tax rate”, into which high earning businesses fall. As discussed here, only 3% of businesses fall into the top two tax brackets.  This does include most large American corporations.  But even among this group, there is a big difference between corporate tax rates and effective taxes paid. A 2011 study by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service showed that, while the statutory corporate tax rate in the US is higher than the … Continue reading this post →

Counter to conservative economic dogma, there is no evidence that tax cuts for the rich result in economic growth.  Anyone who paid attention through Reagan, Clinton, and GW Bush can tell you this is the case, but there’s ample analysis supporting this fact.  In fact, a new study from the Congressional Research Service, “Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945”, looked at 65 years of evidence and found that tax cuts for the top rates and lowering of the capital gains rates had only one discernible effect: increasing income inequality between the richest and everyone else: … Continue reading this post →