Incorporating benefits programs

[jdebacker]

Jacobs, Jongen, and Zoutman (2017) use tax and benefit proposals of candidates in the computation of marginal and effective tax rates.

The Tax-Calculator model currently used does not include benefits programs, which is a limitation.

The PolicyEngine US does include benefits program, but has the following limitations:

• Policy parameter values are generally only available for 2019 onward for benefits (tax parameters generally go back to 2013, the same as in Tax-Calculator)
• There are not ready made parameter files for past presidential candidate tax policy platforms at with Tax-Calculator
• Currently there is not a representative dataset easily useable with PolicyEngine US that has detailed tax information. While such a file is expected soon, it may not be targeted to historical years.
  • PolicyEngine does work well with CPS input files. Perhaps older CPS files could be used for candidate proposals in the past.
• There is significant work to parameterize the presidential candidates' benefits proposals, which, unlike tax proposals, are not often summarized and estimated (useful for validation of the model) by think tanks.

Perhaps inclusion of benefits programs does not make sense at this point, but it is something to consider and additional resources come online for the simulation of marginal and effective tax rates implicit in benefits programs.