Are JCT Analyses of Tax Change Proposals Useful to Individual Taxpayers?

This article examines whether taxpayers may rely on Joint Committee of Taxation (JCT) studies to assess how a proposed tax change will impact their circumstances by evaluating the impact of a proposed tax law change to broaden the individual income tax base and lower individual income tax rates by performing a microeconomic analysis on their explicit tax burdens before and after the proposed change in tax law. Our results indicate that JCT studies do not fully reveal the impact of proposed tax law changes on individual explicit tax burdens. Finally, we provide a simple methodology to determine the distributional impact of tax proposals on individuals using publically available information. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]