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Unless Congress acts in the next six months, the estate tax will be repealed in 2010 and then revert to its 2001 parameters — substantially more burdensome than current levels — in 2011. This bizarre policy makes it very likely that Congress will reform the levy by the end of this year, but it’s unclear [...]

A recent blog post at TheEconomist.com nicely summarizes California’s fiscal mess.  It’s an exaggeration to say the state suffers from “extraordinarily low levels of taxation”—its revenues rank 10th in the nation on a per capita basis, 18th as a share of personal income. But California has been captive to a “something for nothing mentality” since [...]

Note to critics of the public plan option for health insurance: This debate is over. You lost. In 2007, more than 45 percent of all medical costs in the U.S. were paid by government, vastly more than the one-third funded by private insurance.   
Many Americans already have access to public coverage. There is Medicare for [...]

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) is floating the following trial balloon: Congress would fund part of health reform with a cap on the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance but only at a level “significantly above” the cost of the standard plan offered to federal employees. The measure would also exclude policies bargained [...]

Until now, unions have been among the strongest critics of paying for health reform by limiting the tax exclusion for employer sponsored insurance. But on Monday, a well-connected labor lobbyist told me a deal could be done. “It all depends,” he said, “on what the cap looks like.”
Remarkably, in just a few weeks, lawmakers seem to [...]

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom recently proposed a new 33-cent tax on a pack of cigarettes to help pay for the city’s annual $10.7 million litter-collection program, which includes removing cigarette butts from gutters, drainpipes, and sewers. Though this litter tax may be unique, San Francisco is not alone in targeting sin taxes this year. At [...]

As I promised in last Friday’s TaxVox post, here is TPC’s estimate of the 2012 distribution of President Obama’s tax proposals in the 2009 budget, measured against the administration’s chosen baseline. That baseline looks a lot like current policy: extend the Bush tax cuts, index and make permanent the 2009 estate tax, and permanently patch [...]

The Supreme Court’s decision this week in Polar Tankers, Inc. v. City of Valdez not only discusses an interestingly obscure tax prohibition in the U.S. Constitution, but also has a bit of the scholarly reliance on constitutional originalism and purpose.
See our previous post-argument discussion of the case here.
The Court’s decision struck down the property tax [...]

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist signed a bill in March that took effect Tuesday that decouples Florida’s corporate income tax from the federal corporate income tax, retroactive to January 1, 2009. In 2009, the federal government extended a generous depreciation deduction as part of the stimulus package, and Florida now joins several other states in refusing [...]

The New York Times reports that Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell (D) is proposing to raise the state’s individual income tax from 3.07 percent to 3.57 percent for three years, after which it will drop back down to today’s levels. Rendell justified this increase by stating that Pennsylvania has the second-lowest income tax among the 41 [...]