Tax Foundation

This three-year effort begins in 2022.
• Year One: In 2022, we will lay the intellectual, marketing, and social media groundwork for the broader Growth and Opportunity Agenda, while continuing to show the harmful effects of Biden’s tax policies and influence the tax narrative during the midterm elections.
• Year Two: Irrespective of the results of the midterm elections, we will renew our efforts in 2023 to gain broad support of our initiatives on Capitol Hill and expand our social media campaign, while beginning to reach out to candidates as they announce for the presidency and offer our tax modeling services.
• Year Three: 2024 will be focused on working with candidates to score their tax plans, modeling all the competing candidates’ tax proposals and distributing our findings to the public through a multichannel communications effort.

Americans deserve a tax system that is simple, stable, transparent, and neutral, one that unifies and champions a diverse citizenry. Tax Foundation's engaged experts proactively produce principled research on strategies that would advance prosperity if turned into policy, while at the same time providing insightful analysis on policymakers' proposals with our TAG 2.0 dynamic economic model. Our comprehensive and proven strategy for change:
• Engages policy influencers in both parties at the state, federal, and global levels
• Guides lawmakers toward principled tax reforms that grow economies and prosperity
• Educates everyone looking for more information in the tax policy debate
• Inoculates people against political rhetoric and disingenuous talking points
• Identifies and cultivates tax policy leaders for this and future generations.

To influence the state, national, and global tax debates toward economically principled policies, Tax Foundation will produce timely and high-quality data, research, and analysis on federal tax issues.

Tax Foundation’s mission of improving lives through better tax policy is propelled by collaborating with other think tanks, forging relationships with elected officials and their staffs, and openly engaging with supporters.

Tax Foundation maintains healthy relationships with journalists and media outlets to distribute its educational materials and commentary. Using social media, email, website, and direct mail campaigns, Tax Foundation reaches several million people around the globe each year.

Tax Foundation does not advocate for specific legislation, but objectively speaks to the growth or harm a given proposal would have on the economy. The most powerful tool for this data presentation is Tax Foundation’s numerical ranking: by comparing like entities to each other using standard criteria and measurement, Tax Foundation’s Taxes and Growth General Equilibrium Macroeconomic Model gives a full picture of immediate and long-term policy effects.

The Tax Foundation's ambitious tax research and program agenda has had a large impact on state and federal tax debates. At the federal level, we have built the tools and intellectual arguments for initiating a multi-year debate over fundamental tax reform and restoring America's global tax competitiveness. At the state level, we advise policymakers how to make their tax systems more pro-growth and use our various state rankings to foster tax competition between the states. Our research receives a record number of citations, ranging from newspaper and television journalists (over 22,000 media citations in 2023) to governors and presidential candidates. In addition to traditional outreach and media cultivation, our widely-viewed videos have done much to advance public education on key tax issues, as has our blog and our social media presence.

Since 1937, Tax Foundation has worked to improve lives through better tax policy with our core principles of transparency, simplicity, stability, and neutrality.

Over the last 20 years, our partnership has resulted in significant strides. We defended the Bush-era tax cuts in 2004 and took on the painstaking task of explaining who actually bears the tax burden in 2005. Fiscal incidence, distributional effects, the IRET merger, Tax Foundation was there, thanks to our generous supporters.

The game changed entirely in 2011, following the IRET merger, when we launched our dynamic tax modeling project. We modeled the fiscal cliff in 2012, Rep. Dave Camp’s Draft Tax Reform plan in 2014, and Sen. Marco Rubio’s tax plan in 2015, which led to every major 2016 Republican presidential candidate coming to Tax Foundation for a stamp of approval on their tax plan.

2017 was our moment to shine when we modeled Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” Blueprint, which ultimately evolved into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), legislation that leaned heavily on Tax Foundation’s input.

When COVID-19 came to America and crippled economies at every level, we were prepared to act. In 2020, in addition to defending the TCJA, Tax Foundation also modeled the Democratic presidential candidates’ tax plans, provided real-time analysis of COVID-19 economic relief proposals, and launched a new tax policy education platform called TaxEDU.

In 2021, our Taxes and Growth (TAG) Model again flexed its muscles, modeling every aspect of the Biden agenda, from the $3.5 trillion House Ways and Means Build Back Better (BBB) plan, to the infrastructure bill, to the new global minimum tax, and everything in between.

Tax Foundation's trusted analysis regularly places us at the forefront of tax debates, reform, and education. In 2023, we received 25% of all media citations on tax policy. Our legislative outreach and events inform key decision-makers. We met with 58 member offices and testified 7 times on Capitol Hill, testified or presented 41 times before state legislatures, and presented to 12 embassies. We are even reaching classrooms and living rooms: our website had 1.3 million hits in 2023, our explainer videos were viewed over 290,000 times, and our TaxEDU curriculum was used in 1500 classrooms.