Heated debates over tax cut have always been one of the central economic themes on the American political table. Since taxes relate directly to the quality of lives, it is by no means surprising to find people showing significant concern about policies regarding cutting or raising the amount they have to pay. The idea that lowering tax rate makes room for growth has remained generally popular among the majority, taking a possible decrease in individuals’ tax burden and increase in productivity into account. There is, however, extensive research conducted on the topic that produced controversial results. Despite its appeal to instant benefits for one’s saving account and investment, reducing tax rate has yet to show a definite positive effect …show more content…
Whilst William McBride, chief economist for Tax Foundation website, sided with tax cut policy saying that to strengthen the financial state, “we should lower taxes on the earnings of capital,” “workers and the businesses that hire them,” Chye-ching Huang and Nathaniel Frentz, both are senior Tax Policy analysts, completely debunked the evidence McBride provided to support his argument, which includes the review of twenty-three among twenty-six studies he thought to advocate the idea. Indeed, as one conducts research, regardless of what sources it comes from, agreement over tax issue should never be found as a unanimous answer. One of the reasons why it is so difficult to reach a definite conclusion rests on the fact that although some statistics may show economic growth was in step with tax cut, correlation does not mean causation: just as ice-cream sale and murder rate increase during summer time, it is baseless to assume that higher ice-cream consumption leads to higher odds for crime. Moreover, because there is a great amount of research has been done on taxes, different interpretations from these data are understandable. Before concluding that “nearly every empirical study of taxes and economic growth published in a peer reviewed academic journal” finds cutting taxes improves the financial status quo, thus, people need to consider …show more content…
The first and obvious effect would be a deficit in national budget. Without enough money to operate and satisfy community’s needs, the government could be in serious trouble. For taxes cover numerous aspects that directly influence people’s lives, once it displayed signs of insufficiency, standard of living would subsequently go down. According to Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, most of the federal government’s funding goes into defense, social security, and major health problems, with a total of 55 percent for three categories and only 8 percent for benefits for federal retirees and veterans, as well as 3 percent for all other purposes. Allowing tax cuts thus means letting community services weaken in quality and putting the national security at risk. Additionally, budget deficit can also lead to reduction in investment, net exports, and international asset flows, as analyzed by Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw, research associates of the National Bureau of Economic Research, in their “What Do Budget Deficit Do?” article. What results from these abatements evidently affects the economy heavily, both by devaluing the nation’s currency and decreasing the overall GDP. Considering such possible consequences, hence, it is no longer valid to state that lowering taxes equals growing the economic
The governments in any country use various taxation systems to raise funds to fund its national projects. The most common tax system is the income tax whereby the government raises funds from individual’s earnings. However, in the past few years, there has been heated debate about the adverse effects of progressive income tax on productivity and a proposal to replace it with national sales tax (Hodge, 2017). The national sales tax also known as the fair tax is intended to replace the current income tax and the idea is to enable the government to generate income from consumptions as opposed to earnings. This document examines the positives and negatives of the proposed national sales tax on the U.S. economy. The suggestion to impose a tax on consumption rather than consumption aims at encouraging savings and investments to improve productivity and promote economic growth. It is expected to promote fairness in the taxation because individuals will pay according to what they consume and not what they earn.
Another idea would be to avoid increasing the tax rates as this will help “minimize economic distortions that shrink the level of production” (Baker III, 2009, p. 1). To promote economic growth, our team recommends that we take the approach of increasing the corporate tax base and decreasing the corporate tax rates. Other suggestion is to reduce the deductibility of state and local taxes. Other reforms that could be looked
Tax decreases can stimulate economic growth because if people are paying less in taxes, they have more money to spend. It has been proven over the years that tax decreases generate economic growth and federal revenue will always rise. From a personal standpoint I always spend more during tax season because I usually get a good return; since I am a single parent and full-time student, therefore, I qualify for various tax breaks. These obviously affect my household because I am more disposable income. Tax decreases can help a business if their taxes are decreased the organization will payout less and have more income.
"They discounted a lot of positive growth effects of tax reform package," Huffman said of the recent analysis. "That's one government analysis, granted what some folks would call 'mainstream.' History proves that tax reform — tax cuts specifically — they grow the federal revenue. Why? Businesses make more money and people have larger paychecks and they are putting more into the economy."
Introduced in July 2012, H.R. 8, the Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act of 2012, sponsored by Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, was approved by the House of Representatives in August 2012 and forwarded to the Senate for consideration. Opponents of H.R. 8 maintain that the plan does not provide tax cuts for all American taxpayers while supporters on both sides of the aisle argue that these changes to the Internal Revenue Code are needed to sustain the nation's economic recovery and prevent another recession. To determine the facts in the debate over H.R. 8, the Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act of 2012, this paper provides a review of relevant governmental and media sources, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.
The tax policy in the United States is very confusing. When the tax policy was originally written in 1913 it was four hundred pages. Now, over the past ninety one years, that tax policy has evolved to over 72,000 pages. Since the tax code has become so lengthy and nearly impossible to understand, the topic of tax reform has been in the minds of many. Although, most barely think about tax reform until tax season. It is a controversial subject due to the impact a change in tax code would have on the American people. The two most popular and widely known stakeholders in this debate are the two major political parties in the United States, the Democrats and the Republicans. The two parties share absolutely no common ground on the subject of
Wouldn't it be a perfect world if everyone paid their fair share of taxes? Shouldn’t everyone have skin in the game? For example, if the tax rate was 10%, then the person earning $10,000 per year would pay $1,000 in taxes, and the person earning $100,000 per year would pay $10,000 in taxes. Does this sound too good to be true? Many complain that our current tax system is broken and there has to be a better tax system. During this last presidential campaign, the idea of a flat tax system was once again discussed as an option by one of the candidates. Over the years, many bills have been introduced to congress to change our tax system. Right now, Congress is debating on a new tax system. Our President is pushing for change as he realizes the current system is not going to get the deficit down. We may not see significant change this term, but it will be interesting to see how it all turns out. This paper will discuss what is wrong with our current system, the possible solution of adopting a flat tax system, the counter evidence of why a flat tax system is probably not the solution to our tax problem and why this evidence is right. Our current system is very complex, not efficient, biased, and basically not effective. Did you know the current tax code has over 9 million words? (books.google.com) (241 words) It’s no wonder people want change. I think most would agree our current tax system needs revised. We hear on the news how big corporations pay little in
This idea of reducing taxes to increase investment within the economy sounds like a good idea but hasn’t lived up to its expectations historically. The idea of supply side economics wasn’t a new idea for the American tax code. During the early 1920s, income tax rates were cut multiple times which averaged to a total of most rates being cut by a little less than half. The Mellon Tax Cuts named after Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. He believed that changes in income tax rates causes individuals to change their behavior and practices. As taxes rise, tax payers attempt to reduce taxable income by either working less, retiring earlier, reducing business expansions, restructure companies or spending more money on accountants to find tax loopholes. If executed properly tax cuts can actually benefit economic growth, data from the Internal Revenue Service(IRS) showed that the across-the-board tax cuts in the early 1920s resulted in greater tax payments and larger tax share paid by those in the higher incomes. As the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners were cut from 60 percent or more to just 25 percent, the amount that this tax group payed soared from around 300 million to 700 million per year. (See Figure 2) This sudden massive increase in revenue allowed the U.S. economy to rapidly expand during the mid and late 20s. Between 1920 to 1929, real gross national product grew at an annual average rate of 4.7 percent and
According to the article, The Bush Tax Cuts Have Had a Disastrous Fiscal Impact, “In the "no Bush tax cuts" alternate universe, our debt-to-GDP ratio would be less than 50 percent this year even after all the other fiscal shocks of the past 10 years.” To me this is an astonishing thing that the US economy could be in much better shape if the Bush Tax Cuts were not created. The tax cut will primarily only benefit the rich because they are paying the majority of the taxes, so if you think that imposing more tax cuts will benefit the economy as a whole then I think you need to listen up and figure out why in fact it does not benefit everybody. I definitely think there are more cons to a tax cut then a tax rise, so let me explain to you all of
While most taxpayers agree that tax reform is necessary for our country the problem they encounter is the difficulty they experience when trying to understand all the political terms used when discussing tax reform. This paper is an attempt to help the taxpayers of our country to better understand the political terminology and gain knowledge about some of the proposals that have been explored.
"The most perennially political issues in the United States is the question of how much Americans should be taxed. Indeed, discounted over taxes was one of the major motivating factors in the revolution that established the United States as an independent nation"("Extending Tax Cuts", 1). Since taxes are one of the biggest topics in politics, there is always going to be two sides of the subject, and Taxes will always strike controversy in our country. The topic of having the rich pay more in tax has a deep history to consider, and there will always be both supporters and critics who continue to debate this topic.
. . tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now".
The United States is in a recession; it has been facing some of the worse economic times since the Great Depression in the 1930’s. One option to fix the economy is to change the corporate tax rate. To lower it or to raise it, that is the question economists have been speculating. America's high corporate tax rate and worldwide system of taxation discourages U.S. companies from sending their foreign-source revenue home, which makes U.S. companies defenseless to foreign acquisition from the international opponents (Camp). Corporations and United States citizens have been fighting for a tax reform, which would hopefully help the American economy; either by lowering the corporate tax, or by raising the tax.
The encouragement of economic disparity because of these tax cuts is bad for America. The US should be aiming for more social and economic equality for everybody. Tax cuts can slow down the economy by putting more money into the wealthy peoples’ hands and giving less to the people who need it.
Raising and cutting of taxes has been a tool through which governments use in determining and controlling certain factors in the economy. This is because cutting or increasing taxes has specific negative and positive outcomes. Cutting or increasing income tax has significant influence on investment, savings and the overall domestic gross product of the country. Cutting or significantly increasing income tax will also have an impact on the performance of the country in terms of exportations.