Tax Reform and Tax Experts

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed in 2017, represents the most comprehensive revision of the U.S. income tax since the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86). Although the TCJA shares many features with TRA86—corporate tax rate cuts, increasing the standard deduction, cutting back on deductions—it sharply differs in that it is neither revenue neutral nor distributionally neutral, both aspects of which are troubling in light of the large long-run federal fiscal imbalance and rising income inequality. Regardless of one's normative evaluation, the TCJA provides scores of natural experiments that can inform us about the consequences of tax changes on a wide range of economic behaviors.