IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rut/rutres/201121.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Desperately Seeking Revenue

Author

Listed:
  • Rosanne Altshuler

    () (Rutgers University, Department of Economics)

  • Katherine Lim

    () (Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center)

  • Roberton Williams

    () (Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center)

Abstract

In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Office warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center Model, whether incremental reforms of the current tax system could raise enough revenue to reduce the deficit to a sustainable level over the last five years of the current 10-year budget window. We conclude that feasible tax increases within the current tax structure cannot generate sufficient revenues to bring federal budget deficits under control.

Suggested Citation

  • Rosanne Altshuler & Katherine Lim & Roberton Williams, 2011. "Desperately Seeking Revenue," Departmental Working Papers 201121, Rutgers University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:rut:rutres:201121
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sas.rutgers.edu/virtual/snde/wp/2011-21.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martin Feldstein, 1999. "Tax Avoidance And The Deadweight Loss Of The Income Tax," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 81(4), pages 674-680, November.
    2. Emmanuel Saez & Joel Slemrod & Seth H. Giertz, 2012. "The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates: A Critical Review," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 50(1), pages 3-50, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    budget deficit; tax reform; individual taxation;

    JEL classification:

    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • H60 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rut:rutres:201121. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/derutus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.