Tax Foundation

Parents and students are gearing up for a new school year, and this fall brings a welcome addition to classrooms nationwide. Personal finance courses, long an afterthought in the classroom, are now a graduation requirement or legislated for implementation in 30 states. This is good news. But a crucial component is often missing from or mistaught in these courses: taxes. You wouldn’t hand a 16-year-old the keys to a car and expect them to know how to drive.

At the Republican National Convention in Dallas, President Trump promised payments of $5,000 to every adult citizen in the US if the Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. Vice President JD Vance later supported the idea, saying that the president’s new tariffs are generating a lot of revenue that can be shared with Americans. A $5,000 dividend payment would be extremely costly.

There’s something you and I have in common with Patrick Mahomes, Bijan Robinson, Puka Nacua, and Jalen Carter. (If you’re anything like me, it’s certainly not athleticism, fame, or career earning potential.) When NFL players travel for away games this year and owe so-called “jock taxes” to the states in which they play, they’re just complying with a special set of rules for the nonresident income taxes that all of us owe when we earn income out of state.

A forthcoming Tax Law Review article, “Taxation and Deglobalization,” by prominent legal scholar Reuven Avi-Yonah argues that after certain fixes to the tax baseThe tax base is the total amount of income, property, assets, consumption, transactions, or other economic activity subject to taxation by a tax authority. A narrow tax base is non-neutral and inefficient.

Few reforms in Options for Reforming America’s Tax Code 3.0: A Policymaker’s Guide to Tax Reform Trade-Offs simultaneously raise revenue and increase the size of the economy. Replacing the business income taxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. with a destination-based cash flow tax (DBCFT) is one such option.

Utah, Maryland, and Illinois are dissimilar states in many ways, but they have this in common: they are the first three states to impose digital advertising taxes. It’s a short list that may be getting shorter, as the Maryland TaxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities.

Investment in digital assets, long thought of as a niche interest reserved for enthusiasts, has broken into the mainstream. In 2026, about one in five US adults report being invested in or using cryptocurrency. The market capitalization of cryptocurrency grew tenfold from mid-2020 to its late-2025 high.

Economists and journalists have been pointing to a labor share of income series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as evidence that capital is taking an ever-increasing slice of the economic pie. By that series, labor’s share fell from nearly two-thirds in the 1950s to about half today, fueling headlines like “U.S. workers’ share of national income falls to a new low.” But a closer look at the national income accounts shows a different story.

Ten years ago, then-Speaker Paul Ryan and Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady released the “Better Way” TaxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. Plan, the blueprint that would eventually become the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017—the largest overhaul of the US tax code in over 30 years.

TaxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. Foundation’s new resource, Options for Reforming America’s Tax Code 3.0: A Policymaker’s Guide to Tax Reform Trade-Offs, models the economic, distributional, and revenue effects of 86 different changes to the tax code.