Adam N. Michel
Adam N. Michel
This month Cato is hosting a Congressional Fellowship on tax and trade ahead of a year that promises to be busy for both policy areas. The fellowship is a nine-week program attended by a bi-partisan cohort of congressional staff that engage in weekly discussion sessions with featured speakers. The first four discussions are dedicated to tax policy. We will cover tax code basics, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), radical tax reforms, and international tax. After each week’s session, I will provide an embellished class outline for those who want to follow along. This is the first in a four-part series.
The first session starts with an overview of US federal revenue sources and the distribution of who pays taxes. We then cover some differences between income and consumption tax bases, tax expenditures, and the deadweight loss caused by high tax rates. This class was co-taught with Cato’s Chirs Edwards.
Sources of Revenue
Americans paid roughly $7.2 trillion in taxes across all levels of government (federal, state, local) in 2023. The federal government collected two-thirds of that revenue, or about $4.7 trillion.
About half of federal revenue comes from the individual income tax (Figure 1). The income tax includes revenues from taxes on wages, capital gains and dividends, and pass-through businesses. The United States is relatively unique in that a majority of business profits are “passed through” to individual tax returns and taxed as personal income.
The income tax system is structured with brackets that apply progressively higher tax rates to different income ranges. Rates start at 10 percent for the lowest incomes and increase incrementally to 37 percent for the highest incomes, with each rate applying only to income within its specific income bracket.
Payroll taxes make up 36 percent of federal revenue. They consist of a flat 12.4 percent tax on wages up to $176,100 (in 2025) that partially funds Social Security and a 2.9 percent tax (with no wage cap) that funds about a third of Medicare. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/cato-tax-bootcamp-tax-code-101