The Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy takes a quantitative approach to analyzing the economic, budgetary, and distributional impact of important campaign, legislative, and other popular tax proposals using our General Equilibrium Model, known as our Taxes and Growth (TAG) Model.
The mission of our economic and tax modeling program is to educate lawmakers and the public about the key trade-offs in tax policy, the real-world impact of those trade-offs on taxpayers and our economy, and the best options for achieving principled and pro-growth tax reform.
The Tax Foundation uses and maintains a General Equilibrium Model, known as our Taxes and Growth (TAG) Model to simulate the effects of government tax and spending policies on the economy and on government revenues and budgets.
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The Tax Foundation models tax policy using our proprietary Taxes and Growth model, illustrating the economic, revenue, and distributional impacts of different changes to the federal tax code. We’ve recently implemented improvements to the model that have been underway for the past several years, and we will be detailing them further in our forthcoming model methodology update.
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This tax reform plan would boost long-run GDP by 2.5%, grow wages by 1.4%, and add 1.3M jobs, all while collecting a similar amount of tax revenue as the current code and reducing the long-run debt burden.
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Policymakers should have two priorities in the upcoming economic policy debates: a larger economy and fiscal responsibility. Principled, pro-growth tax policy can help accomplish both.
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A robust collection of 70 potential US tax reform changes and US tax reform options for reforming the tax code. See the comprehensive tax reform guide.
Lawmakers should use the most comprehensive analytical tools available to them—like dynamic scoring—to make informed decisions about policy changes.
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The Supreme Court is deciding a case over whether the President can impose sweeping tax increases on imported goods. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar question with enormous implications for the US economy, taxpayers, and limitations on emergency powers.
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The Trump tariffs amount to an average tax increase per US household of $1,200 in 2025 and $1,600 in 2026.
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The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) simultaneously increased tax progressivity and decreased redistribution in the tax code. Our estimates suggest the OBBBA similarly combines a more progressive tax system with a lower degree of tax redistribution.
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Policymakers are considering ways to extend the enhancements made to Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that expire at the end of the year, which could cost $350 billion over the next decade. Any expansion of the credits should be offset by reducing other healthcare subsidies or preferences in the tax code, the largest of which is the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) premiums, estimated to cost more than $5 trillion over the next decade due to reduced income and payroll tax revenue.
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The US fiscal trajectory is on an unsustainable path over the next 35 years, regardless of whether the IEEPA tariffs are struck down or maintained.
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While the OBBBA brings some stability by making many of the TCJA’s reforms permanent, it generally fails to reform the tax code’s accumulating complexity.
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We estimate the OBBBA will reduce federal taxes on average for individual taxpayers in every state. Across all individual tax filers throughout the US, the average tax cut per taxpayer will be over $3,700 in 2026.
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Our experts explain how this major tax legislation may affect you and how policymakers can better improve the tax code.
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However states choose to respond to other tax provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, they should conform to the pro-growth provisions, which represent a marked improvement in the corporate tax code.
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Our analysis finds that the Trump tariffs threaten to offset much of the economic benefits of the new tax cuts, while falling short of paying for them.
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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes many of the individual tax cuts and reforms of the TCJA permanent. It improves upon the TCJA by making expensing for R&D and equipment permanent. However, for the most part, it does not include further structural reforms, and instead introduces many new, narrow tax breaks to the code, adding complexity and raising revenue costs.
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We estimate the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would increase long-run GDP by 1.2 percent and reduce federal tax revenue by $5 trillion over the next decade on a conventional basis.
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President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, 2025.
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The increased senior deduction with the phaseout would deliver a larger tax cut to lower-middle- and middle-income taxpayers compared to exempting all Social Security benefits from income taxation and would not weaken the trust funds as much. But given the temporary nature of the policy, it would increase the deficit-impact of the reconciliation bills without boosting long-run economic growth.
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Lawmakers are right to be concerned about deficits and economic growth. The best path to address those concerns is to ensure OBBB provides permanent full expensing of capital investment, avoids inefficient tax cuts, and offsets remaining revenue losses by closing tax loopholes and reducing spending.
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Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) CREATE JOBS Act prioritizes permanence for the most cost-effective tax reforms—expensing and Neutral Cost Recovery (NCRS)—to boost growth in a relatively fiscally responsible way.
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Our preliminary analysis finds the tax provisions increase long-run GDP by 0.8 percent and reduce federal tax revenue by $4.0 trillion from 2025 through 2034 on a conventional basis before added interest costs.
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Short FormWhen you hear about tax policy, you may think of the IRS, the agency responsible for collecting federal taxes. But who is responsible for drafting, reviewing, assessing, and passing tax legislation at the federal level?
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Letting the SALT cap slip further upwards would undercut the TCJA’s long-term legacy, worsening the fiscal outlook of the tax package and providing an unneeded benefit to higher earners.
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As lawmakers consider options for budgetary offsets, they should prioritize competitiveness and economic growth, as a heavier corporate tax burden will undermine the core purpose and achievement of the TCJA.
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