The progressive Economic Policy Institute is out with a menu of tax hike options it hopes policymakers will consider. The paper and the related Politico interview are worthy of a response.

“A lot of people assume the public is anti-tax. But they might just be very annoyed because they think the wealthy are avoiding their obligations,” said Josh Bivens of EPI, the author of the report…

“Might” taxpayers be “annoyed” because they “think” the wealthy are avoiding their obligations? A lot of fudge factors in that sentence. Certainly the latter point rings true — polling consistently shows that Americans believe …

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The proposed changes to grantor trusts included in the Build Back Better Act (H.R. 5376) are a serious threat to Main Street employers nationwide. The authors claim these changes would ensure billionaires “pay their fair share,” but in reality they would fall most heavily on family-owned businesses, making it all but impossible for some of them to survive from one generation to the next.

To highlight this threat, S-Corp sent a letter today to the House’s top tax writers detailing the history of grantor trusts, the flaws in the proposals in H.R. 5376, and the harm they would inflict on …

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With the Senate Majority Leader committed to a “dual-track” legislative strategy that includes a partisan budget resolution, Congress will soon be tasked with deciding which revenue raisers to include in a multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation package. A key area of concern for private companies is the estate tax and related provisions.

Some proposals under consideration, like applying capital gains taxes at death, literally threaten the ability of family businesses to survive from one generation to the next, and the family business community is understandably alarmed about their prospects.  As such, we wanted to provide an update on the latest developments in this space, …

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The Peterson Institute held a “Combating Inequality” event last week that included a vigorous debate over wealth taxes.  The heavyweight match between Emmanuel Saez – the leading advocate for wealth taxes these days – and Larry Summers in particular is worth watching.

One aspect missing from the debate, however, was how wealth taxes would handcuff successful private businesses.  Summer briefly touches on the challenge his family’s hardware store would have paying the tax, but there is so much more to it.  Wealth taxes:

• Are far larger than their headline numbers suggest;
• Paid on top of all existing taxes;
• Hit hardest …
  
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