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Sustaining Progressivity In The Budget Process: A Commentary On Gale & (And) Orszag's An Economic Assessment Of Tax Policy In The Bush Administration, 2001-2004 The State Of Federal Income Taxation Symposium: Rates, Progressivity, And Budget Processes, Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

This Commentary proposes the adoption of pay-go procedural rules for tax lawmaking that favor tax cuts that decrease income inequality, in response to biases in distributional tables and distortions in the political process. It suggests that the failure to use present value analysis in the budget process has had unfortunate, unintended consequences, in particular, a congressional preference for a prepaid-type consumption tax. This Commentary argues that efforts to index the Alternative Minimum Tax (the "AMT") should not deflect attention from the AMT's most fundamental distributional problem-its failure to treat dividends and capital gains as preference items. It suggests that there …