Today is Tax Day, the holiday for publishing tax-related commentary.
I’m not making fun. We got in on the action as well. Right here on the NR website, read:
- Adam Michel of the Cato Institute on why automatic withholding should end.
- Akash Chougule of Americans for Prosperity on why Republicans need to continue to provide a contrast with Democrats on taxes and spending.
Here’s some other interesting commentary from around the web for your Tax Day:
- More from Adam Michel on the Cato Daily Podcast.
- Jason Trennert calls automatic withholding “Milton Friedman’s worst mistake” in the Wall Street Journal. “Friedman’s wife, Rose, also an accomplished economist, vehemently opposed its introduction,” Trennert writes. “Like some mistakes married men make, all indications are that she didn’t let him forget it. ‘Rose has never forgiven me for the part I played in devising and developing withholding for the income tax,’ he once said.”
- The WSJ editorial board got ahead of the game and wrote against the IRS Direct File program a few days ago: “So far it’s a bust. The IRS predicted ‘several hundred thousand’ would use direct file. But as Monday’s tax deadline approaches, sources tell us the IRS has accepted fewer than 60,000 returns via Direct File—about 0.3% of the eligible pool.”
- Demian Brady of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation considers the compliance burden of the tax code: “The opportunity cost of the time spent laboring over taxes comes out to $280 billion, while filers also incur out-of-pocket expenses on preparation costs amounting to at least $133 billion,” NTUF research finds. “That total is likely higher but the IRS has not complied with statutory requirements to assess this cost across its full inventory of tax forms.”
- Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum also looks at the compliance burden. He writes that the cost of compliance is up significantly over last year because of one new regulation on reporting digital assets.
- Robert VerBruggen at City Journal notes how the tax code treats marriage: “Tax scholars often speak of a ‘trilemma’ regarding marriage,” he writes. “It’s nearly impossible to have a tax system that simultaneously (A) is progressive, taxing higher incomes at higher rates; (B) taxes couples based on their total earnings, regardless of how those earnings are distributed across one or both spouses; and (C) taxes couples the same regardless of whether they are married.”
- Grover Norquist at Fox News considers what a second-term Biden tax agenda would look like: “Biden’s written plan calls for a small business tax hike, a corporate tax hike, a capital gains and dividends tax hike, income tax hikes, energy tax hikes and even a second Death Tax on top of the first one.”
- Thomas Savidge of the American Institute for Economic Research writes at Townhall on how government wastes taxpayer money. He proposes three possible fiscal reforms — a tax-and-expenditure limit similar to Colorado’s TABOR, a debt brake similar to Switzerland’s, or a fiscal commission — that could help get spending back under control.
- Vance Ginn at AIER’s website notes that Tax Freedom Day is tomorrow. “We work 30 percent of our days to pay government alone,” he writes.
- Timothy Taylor writes on his blog about how a large proportion of the shareholders in U.S. corporations are not taxed: “Back in the 1980s, 80% of this ownership was in the form of taxable accounts. But the share of US corporate stock held by foreign investors and retirement accounts has risen substantially, and nonprofits own a chunk of US corporate stocks as well. So in the last two decades, only 20-30% of US corporate stock is in taxable accounts.”
- Brian Domitrovic at Law & Liberty writes about how the process of filing your taxes has changed over time: “Doing your income taxes in the super-high tax-rate era, before the Kennedy tax cut of 1964—if not the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s—was an exercise in taking enormous amounts out of the top line in accounting terms (revenues) to yield a small bottom line (income or profits subject to taxation). Today, tax rates are lower. . . . And yet we collect 17 percent of GDP in tax revenue, a shade more than when tax rates were far higher.”