The Tax Calculator is a calculator for the US federal individual income tax system. In conjunction with micro data that represents US taxpayer characteristics and a set of behavioral assumptions, we use the Tax Calculator to conduct revenue scoring and distributional analyses of tax policies.
Documentation for many of the core variables used by the Tax Calculator is available at http://users.nber.org/~taxsim/gdb/gdb08.pdf.
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The Tax Calculator is derived from taxcalc.sas, a program written by Dan Feenberg (NBER) and Inna Shapiro (NBER). Dan Feenberg, Sameer Sarkar, Matt Jensen, and Ilia Kurenkov have contributed to OSPC's Tax Calc.
The Open-Source Policy Center (OSPC) is a project of the American Enterprise Institute that seeks to make policy analysis more transparent, trustworthy, and collaborative by harnessing open-source methods to build cutting-edge economic models.
Policymakers increasingly rely on computer-driven models to predict the budgetary and broader economic impacts of current and proposed policies, especially those involving taxes and entitlements. Estimates from these models often determine a bill’s success or failure in the legislative process and public sphere. Despite their importance, however, existing models are proprietary and not subject to significant peer review or oversight. The computer code that comprises the models is not visible to outsiders, and only a few organizations and political leadership can use the models to analyze their policy ideas. Simple miscalculation and biases are difficult to discern, and when problems are perceived, they are difficult or impossible to correct. For non-leadership politicians or citizens without access to these models, it is nearly impossible to participate in the policy debate, and democracy is undermined.
OSPC's first project is building tools to analyze the budgetary and broader economic impact of taxes. These models are be completely transparent and freely available to researchers across the country, and an easy-to-use online interfaces will allow students, policymakers, journalists, and informed citizens to interact with the models and learn for themselves about the effects of policies.
Documentation for our peers' revenue estimating models:
Joint Committee on Taxation https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4500
Tax Policy Center http://www.urban.org/publications/411136.html