Actual tax policy remains on hold in Congress (listen to our recent “Talking Taxes in a Truck” for that discussion) but there’s been some activity in recent weeks that’s worth highlighting nonetheless.  Specifically:

• Yesterday’s Finance hearing entitled, “Examining How the Tax Code Affects High-Income Individuals and Tax Planning Strategies”
• Wednesday’s Senate Budget hearing entitled, “Fairness and Fiscal Responsibility: Cracking Down on Wealthy Tax Cheats”
• A new Auten/Splinter paper examining income inequality and income shares

Here’s a quick summary of each and how it is all related to pass-through taxation.  Kind of like six degrees of separation minus …

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Massive deficits, the fiscal cliff, and Social Security’s pending insolvency are jump-starting a long overdue debate over real tax reform – specifically, how should we best reorganize the tax code to survive the fiscal hurdles we know are coming?

Three distinct voices have emerged recently to offer their views. Which offers the best hope for success? What impact would each have on small and family-owned businesses?  Here’s a review of the competing plans, together with some thoughts on how to best tax business income from the Main Street perspective. (In a follow-up post, we will put forward our own …

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Doug Holtz-Eakin has a thoughtful blog post this week on the deterioration of our “voluntary” compliance tax system.

Whenever the term “voluntary” is used when discussing taxes, the tendency is for the audience to bust out laughing. Okay, sure, but it’s a real concept that used to be the heart of our tax system. Rather than send tax collectors door-to-door to make collections, our system relied on taxpayers calculating their own liability and then sending in the appropriate amount.

It was fairly unique in the world yet, as Doug points out, our compliance rate consistently ranks at the top at a solid …

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