Tax Policy Center

I'm very pleased to introduce our panelists, William Gale, the RJ and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.

Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, the opposing director's chair, and a senior fellow in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies federal tax policy.

John Sablehaus, a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, an adjunct research professor at the University of Michigan.

and Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law.

We look forward to hearing from each of our panelists, and we want to get to as many of your questions as we can.

Rich people will decide to leave rather than pay the tax, which whether or not enough people would actually leave to really impact Washington's economy is up for debate.

But I think this argument is interesting because when Senate Majority Leader Jamie Peterson, the architect of the millionaire's tax, was asked about this by Cuomo, he said lawmakers have actually been discussing this with Seattle Children's, and they have talked about raising the charitable deduction to something more in line with federal rules, which, according to the Tax Policy Center, is up to 60% of your income.

David, do you think...

This argument will resonate with voters?

Hi, I'm Gene Steuerle.

I'm a co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

I was former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury.

My most current efforts are in regard to fiscal policy, and my latest book is Abandoned: How Republicans and Democrats Deserted the Working Class, The Young, and the American Dream.

So I will introduce them briefly, and we will get onto a fantastic conversation.

First, we have Jeff Friedman, partner at Eversheds Sutherland; Brian Hammer, senior counsel at the Multistate Tax Commission; and Lucy Dadayan is a principal research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Thank all of you so much for joining us today.

I think this is gonna be a fantastic conversation.

With midterm elections just weeks away, both Republican and Democratic candidates are talking about cutting property taxes more.

Thomas Brosey, senior research associate with the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C., says that would mean finding billions of dollars in taxes some other way.

What would make up for that? Taxes doesn't have an income tax.

So what's left is the sales tax.

Now, Boyle cites $10 trillion in his note as the cumulative effect of Trump's tax cuts, and he may be right because it's all just estimates.

Now, the US Tax Policy Center has, uh, produced an analysis of the 2017 cuts, which shows that the bottom 60% of voters by income received a boost of less than 2% to their incomes.

Only 0.4% to the bottom 20%, who incidentally are largely MAGA voters.

But a 3.5% boost to the elite top 1%.

Well, guess what? Dana Bash can't even fathom being as intelligent as Scott Bessent, and it blew up in her face.

Tax Policy Center says the majority of the tax benefits will go to Americans making $217,000 or more a year.

The Yale Budget Lab says the richest Americans will see their income rise by nearly 2%.

The lowest earning Americans will see their income drop by 3% when factoring in cuts to Medicaid and s- and, uh, food stamps.

From the same article that I was going through with, uh, Newsweek, Carolla's explosive rant touches one of the biggest fault lines in America's tax system.

The Tax Policy Center estimated that roughly 40% of US households, about 76 million tax units, would pay no federal individual income taxes back in 2025 when they did this study.

The reality is, and I've talked about this many times, the reality is that the top 1% of taxpayers pay 38.4% of the total federal income tax revenue.

That's the top 1%.