Is Amazon a great company, or what? As aficionados of innovation (and, face it, recreational online shopping), it’s been a pleasure to watch the company become a retailing giant. Trouble is, Amazon has been as innovative in its campaign to avoid collecting state sales taxes as …
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By Robert Hahn, Peter Passell | Tags: Amazon, California, Dick Durbin, sales tax | Category: Tax Policy |
 Leave a commentWe join the 99.974 percent of economists in applauding the Senate’s bipartisan vote to repeal the 45-cent-a-gallon tax credit reaped by ethanol refiners and the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on ethanol imports. That doesn’t mean we’re done with the credit, of course: The refiners, led by ADM, will have a thing … By Robert Hahn, Peter Passell | Tags: ADM, E10, ethanol, ethanol tariff, tax credit | Category: Quick Takes, Tax Subsidies |
Leave a commentAs everybody knows, Pres. Obama unveiled a $350 billion mini-stimulus package last week, one consisting of accelerated investment write-offs, a permanent tax credit for R&D and another round of infrastructure spending. We hope (but doubt) he can convince Congress to go along: With unemployment seemingly stuck above 9 percent, the … By Robert Hahn, Peter Passell | Tags: Medicare, payroll tax, Social Security | Category: Tax Policy |
Leave a commentI’m of two minds about revenue-starved states that are taking on powerful bottled soda interests by proposing hefty taxes on calorically sweetened soft drinks. On the one hand, taxes on external costs may, in principle, increase efficiency rather than decrease it. On the other, while it is plausible that sweetened drinks … By Peter Passell | Tags: cigarette tax, externalities, Justin Fox, soda tax | Category: Quick Takes, Tax Policy |
Leave a commentHoward Gleckman, the editor of TaxVox, reminds us why the Alternative Minimum Tax , the despicable bait-and-switch provision of the federal tax code that steals back most deductions for upper-middle-income taxpayers, is so hard to fix on a permanent basis. Every official body that projects federal … By Robert Hahn, Peter Passell | Tags: alternate minimum tax, Howard Gleckman, tax credit, TaxVox, Urban Institute | Category: Quick Takes, Tax Policy |
One commentMegan McArdle’s analysis of tax burdens in The Atlantic business blog offers a nice dose of common sense, which has largely been missing from the ritual grumbling over Tax Day. She notes that, while the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes are regressive, the working poor are … By Robert Hahn, Peter Passell | Tags: Alternative Minimum Tax, Earned Income Tax Credit, Megan McArdle, President Reagan, tax reform | Category: Tax Policy |
One commentDeliana Kostova, Hana Ross, Evan Blecher, and Sara Markowitz estimate that the elasticity of demand for cigarettes for teenagers in poor countries is a remarkably high -1.83. That’s doubly good news. First, it suggests that price incentives (as opposed to prohibitions) … By Robert Hahn, Peter Passell | Tags: Deliana Kostova, Evan Blecher, Hana Ross, price incentives, Sara Markowitz, tobacco | Category: Quick Takes, Tax Policy |
Leave a commentAnybody up for a tax on sales of financial assets – maybe a quarter cent on the dollar? A lot of people are, actually. One reason is opportunism: finding sources of revenue to fund virtuous causes in ways that don’t anger the voters. British PM Brown and President Sarkozy of France … |
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