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Taxes

Over the past 40 years, federal revenues have ranged from nearly 21 percent of GDP, in fiscal year 2000, to less than 16 percent, in fiscal years 2009 through 2012; they have averaged about 18 percent of GDP over the four decades. In addition to projecting the future course of federal revenues, CBO analyzes the budgetary and economic effects of various features of the federal tax system and the effects of potential changes to current tax rules.

Sub-Topics:

  • Analysis of the President's Budget
  • Budget and Economic Outlook
  • Distribution of Federal Taxes
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Expiring Tax Provisions—August 2012 Baseline

data or technical information

August 22, 2012

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Trends in The Distribution of Household Income, 1979–2009

presentation

August 8, 2012

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monthly archive

  • May 2013 (2)
  • April 2013 (14)
  • March 2013 (22)
  • February 2013 (10)
  • January 2013 (11)
  • December 2012 (4)
  • November 2012 (10)
  • October 2012 (4)
  • September 2012 (6)
  • August 2012 (5)
  • July 2012 (11)
  • June 2012 (8)
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CBO To Release Updated Budget and Economic Outlook On August 22

blog post

August 2, 2012


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H.R. 6169, the Pathway to Job Creation through a Simpler, Fairer Tax Code Act of 2012.

cost estimate

July 26, 2012

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S. 3326, a bill to amend the African Growth and Opportunity Act to extend the third country fabric program and to add South Sudan to the list of countries eligible for designation under that Act, to make technical corrections to the Harmonized Tariff Sche

cost estimate

July 23, 2012

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H.R. 4365, a bill to amend title 5, United States Code, to make clear that accounts in the Thrift Savings Fund are subject to certain federal tax levies

cost estimate

July 20, 2012

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monthly archive

  • May 2013 (2)
  • April 2013 (14)
  • March 2013 (22)
  • February 2013 (10)
  • January 2013 (11)
  • December 2012 (4)
  • November 2012 (10)
  • October 2012 (4)
  • September 2012 (6)
  • August 2012 (5)
  • July 2012 (11)
  • June 2012 (8)
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CBO Releases Report on the Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009

blog post

July 10, 2012


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  • Supplemental Material

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related publications


  • Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007

    October 25, 2011

  • Average Federal Taxes by Income Group

    June 01, 2010
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The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009

report

July 10, 2012

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H.R. 3609, Taxpayers Right-To-Know Act

cost estimate

July 3, 2012

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New Evidence on the Tax Elasticity of Capital Gains: Working Paper 2012-09

working paper

June 15, 2012

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Abstract

This study uses a large panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2008 to investigate how taxes affect the decision to realize gains. The study distinguishes the persistent effect of tax changes from the transitory effect. Similar to earlier studies in the literature, we use the generalized Tobit model to address the sample selection problem and the endogeneity problem in the tax variables, but we improve the identification of the tax elasticity by using the presence of carryover loss as an exclusion restriction. We also control for the financial sophistication of taxpayers because that could be an important source of omitted variable bias. The preferred persistent elasticity estimate is -0.79, and the transitory estimate is -1.2. Those estimates are statistically significant and are robust to a number of sensitivity tests. Although we focus our examination on personal capital gains, we also compare the results of our model to results from the original model applied to contemporary data, estimate our model on subperiods, and estimate our model on other types of capital gains. We find that passthrough capital gains are highly sensitive to persistent tax changes, but gains from mutual fund distributions are extremely insensitive.


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