Senate Holds Hearing Today on The Future of Individual Tax Rates

The Senate Finance Committee holds a hearing today on The Future of Individual Tax Rates: Effects on Economic Growth and Distribution.  Here are the witnesses scheduled to testify:

• Carol Markman (CPA, Feldman, Meinberg & Co.)
• David Marzahl (President, Center for Economic Progress)
• Donald Marron (Director, Tax Policy Center)
• Douglas Holtz-Eakin (President, American Action Forum)
• Leonard Burman (Professor, Maxwell School, Syracuse University)

In connection with the hearing, the Joint Committee on Taxation has released Present Law and the President’s Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Proposals Related to Selected Individual Income Tax Provisions Scheduled to Expire Under the Sunset Provisions of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (JCX-36-10):

This document ... provides a summary of present law for the principal tax provisions that are subject to the sunset provisions of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (“EGTRRA”). This document also provides a description and analysis of the President’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposals that relate to these provisions, as well as a brief description of the policy adjustments permitted under the Statutory Pay-as-You-Go Act of 2010 (“PAYGO”) related to these provisions. Several provisions of PAYGO apply only to taxpayers with income less than $200,000 ($250,000) for married couples filing a joint return). There is some ambiguity in the PAYGO statute with respect to the reference year for these income levels, and for purposes of this pamphlet we have assumed that those figures represent 2009 income levels, and that the amounts are indexed in future years from those levels. The final section of this pamphlet includes tables of the budget effects of the President’s proposals and the PAYGO policy adjustments, and a distribution table of the provisions of the President’s budget proposals discussed in the pamphlet.