Lessons About Tax Reform from 1986
Everyone seems to agree that it's a good idea to place tax reform at the heart of a package of policies to stave off the fiscal cliff and address the long-term fiscal imbalance. But what can it accomplish other than raising revenue without raising tax rates? One set of lessons comes from the consequences of the last major income tax reform in the United States, the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In a survey article published in the 1997 Journal of Economic Literature, Alan Auerbach and Joel Slemrod investigated this issue. Read what they concluded in: