Jason Furman thinks the Biden Administration’s soon-to-be proposed minimum tax is a good idea.  We can’t think of any reasons why.

Administratively, it will be a nightmare of complex accounting, valuation, and litigation.  From the marginal point of view, they included wages and investment income into the tax base, but it will still create scenarios where the effective rates are outrageously high on America’s family-owned businesses.  There’s the role inflation will play in forcing business owners to pay tax on imaginary gains.  There’s the issue of exactly what we are taxing – capital – the life blood of our economy, …

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Since its introduction, the Biden administration has repeatedly claimed that its tax plan would reverse a trend of rising income inequality in America. The ensuing debate focused almost exclusively on who pays what.  Serious questions about the underlying premise – that income inequality is historically bad and getting worse – have largely been ignored.

That’s a mistake, as our previous posts have made clear.  Income shares tend to fluctuate from generation to generation, but it’s increasingly clear that the narrative of a massive increase in inequality over the past four decades has been driven by a handful of academics …

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Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) once again gave life to the moribund Build Back Better discussions Wednesday by outlining a new, slimmed-down version of the bill that he could support.  According to Politico:

Manchin said that if Democrats want to cut a deal on a party-line bill using the budget process to circumvent a Republican filibuster, they need to start with prescription drug savings and tax reform. He envisions whatever revenue they can wring out of that as split evenly between reducing the federal deficit and inflation, on the one hand, and enacting new climate and social programs, on the other …

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