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Tax Policy Center Releases Flawed and Biased Analysis of Marco Rubio Tax Cut

February 12, 2016

By Ryan Ellis

The liberal Tax Policy Center (TPC) today released their analysis of Marco Rubio’s tax cut plan. I’m sure others will have their own critiques, but there are a few major problems that I wanted to highlight:

The report’s headline score lacks proper context

By far, this is the biggest downside of the report. The headline you’ll read is that the Rubio plan cuts taxes by $6.8 trillion over a decade. This needs to be put in the context of the $42 trillion of revenue the federal government is projected to collect over the next ten years.

So it’s a big score, but it’s not so big when compared to the larger tax revenue picture. Rarely are these two numbers associated, as they always should be. Needless to say, they are not in the TPC report.

TPC’s model is behind the times, flawed, and unreliable

TPC themselves admit that they lack the capacity to do a macroeconomic analysis of the plan. In other words, $6.8 trillion is the static score. Factoring in macroeconomic effects is quickly becoming a best practice in tax scoring. It’s been done for years by the conservative Tax Foundation and others, and has even become a standard tool used by Congress’s own official Joint Tax Committee (JCT). The fact that TPC does not incorporate a reality based score makes the $6.8 trillion number pretty much worthless. They need to update their model to catch up with the rest of the scoring world.

Read the full article at Forbes.com: Tax Policy Center Releases Flawed and Biased Analysis of Marco Rubio Tax Cut

Issue Categories : Marco Rubio, Taxes