Standard deduction expansion, itemizers, avg tax, and mtrs

[MattHJensen]

Concept: Several prominent policy proposals include modifications to the standard deduction, including Donald Trump's tax plan and the House Republican's tax plan. This vizualization allows the user to explore many effects of those reforms. [More coming soon]

Sketch:

Technical notes:

• The microsimulation Tax-Calculator at www.github.com/open-source-economics/tax-calculator ought to be able to perform these calculations.
• Donald Trump's tax plan taxes the standard deduction to $25k for singles and presumably married filing separately. $50k for married filing jointly and presumably head of household. _STD': [[25000, 50000, 25000, 50000, 50000, 25000, 500]],``
• The House republican plan takes the standard deduction to _STD': [[12000, 24000, 12000, 18000, 24000, 12000, 500]],``
• TRE1 contains can serve as a guide for many of the display and slider concepts, the first two charts, and how to calculate the across the board rate cut/hike required to maintain revenue neutrality. I recommend adopting a 0.25 substitution effect for this plot as well given that these reforms ought to have behavioral effects.
• There is a wrinkle in this plot in that the effects of repealing the standard deduction and the effects of increasing the standard deduction have different signs. Some of the text will need to change based on the direction of the sign.
• This notebook demonstrates how to calculate the marginal tax rate plot data, the change in number of taxpayers paying 0 or fewer individual income taxes, the number of taxpayers with marginal rate reductions, and how to implement changes in the standard deduction amounts in tax-calculator.

Matt Jensen (Matt.Jensen@aei.org)

[MattHJensen]

We won't be able to do the Standard deduction repeal until the middle of August due to TaxData limitations. For now, I think it is best to develop this widget without that option. Eliminating that option will also eliminate this wrinkle:

There is a wrinkle in this plot in that the effects of repealing the standard deduction and the effects of increasing the standard deduction have different signs. Some of the text will need to change based on the direction of the sign.