Home/Tax Policy

Pass-Throughs & Inequality

Apollo’s “Daily Spark” had a nice blurb last week featuring the “Everywhere Millionaire.” Here’s what they said:

The income that lifted America’s top 1% did not come mainly from tech or Wall Street, according to The Everywhere Millionaire. More than half of the rise in the top 1% income share since 1985, 5.8 of 10.5 percentage points, flowed through pass-through businesses, see chart below.

The authors, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, counted roughly 3 million wealthy private business owners, with average net worth near $25 million, running law firms, car dealerships, medical practices, commercial contractors and regional restaurant chains, the kind

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2026-09-22T20:02:27+00:00September 22, 2026|

A Ready Reform for Main Street

Congress is looking at targeted, bipartisan reforms to make the tax code work better for taxpayers. That focus creates an opportunity to address the outdated rules governing S corporations.

S corporations are America’s most popular business structure, with more than 6 million businesses employing tens of millions of Americans. Yet one of the basic rules governing them has been frozen for more than two decades. An S corporation may have no more than 100 shareholders, a limit that increasingly gets in the way as successful businesses seek to expand their employee-ownership.

The good news is that lawmakers already have two ways to

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2026-09-18T16:40:19+00:00September 18, 2026|

Tax Relief Takes Center Stage

Republicans in Dallas had plenty to say about last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts bill. Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith made the case directly, recounting the marching orders he gave his colleagues when he took the committee gavel:

When I was selected by my colleagues to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, I told them that we were done writing tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Our priority was going to the working class, men and women we represent in Washington….

Today, thanks to the working families tax cuts, if you are a family of four and make less than

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2026-09-11T19:07:14+00:00September 11, 2026|

How (Not) To Fix Social Security

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Moreno recently proposed lifting the Social Security wage cap to address the program’s pending insolvency. It’s the lazy solution (i.e., throw more money at a problem, declare victory, move on) and also the wrong approach.

Tax expert (and friend of the podcast) George Callas has an excellent writeup on this, along with his thoughts on what Congress should actually be considering.

Nixing the cap would impose a massive marginal tax increase (12.4 percent) on wages above the current $184,500 threshold. That increase would come on top of existing federal, state, and Medicare taxes, and apply

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2026-09-10T15:15:39+00:00September 10, 2026|

US Best for Workers

If you’re looking for a Canadian-themed joke this Labor Day, look past Ryan Reynolds blaming the 1980s on the Cuban Missile Crisis — was he drunk? — and focus instead on senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that if “you want to achieve the American Dream, well, you should move to Canada because it’s twice as likely there.”

That argument is so laughably wrong, even the Canadians disagree with it. A 2024 study by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute compared the per capita income for the Canadian provinces and US states and found the Canadians are a little behind:

Only one

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2026-09-07T18:59:59+00:00September 7, 2026|