Skip to content

Add decomposed marginal tax rate variables (federal, state, FICA) #7790

@PavelMakarchuk

Description

@PavelMakarchuk

Summary

PolicyEngine currently has a single marginal_tax_rate variable that computes the all-in effective marginal rate based on household_net_income (including benefit phaseouts). For comparison with TAXSIM-35, we need separate marginal tax rate variables for each tax component:

  • federal_marginal_tax_rate — marginal change in federal income tax
  • state_marginal_tax_rate — marginal change in state income tax
  • fica_marginal_tax_rate — marginal change in FICA liability

Context

TAXSIM-35 outputs three separate marginal rates (frate, srate, ficar), computed by perturbing wages and measuring the change in each tax component independently. PE's existing marginal_tax_rate measures something fundamentally different — the fraction of marginal income that doesn't increase household net income, which includes benefit cliffs, transfer phaseouts, etc.

These component-level rates would enable apples-to-apples comparison of marginal rates in policyengine-taxsim and would also be independently useful for policy analysis (e.g., showing how much of a marginal rate comes from federal vs. state taxes).

Suggested approach

Follow the same counterfactual pattern as marginal_tax_rate but measure Δincome_tax, Δstate_income_tax, and Δemployee_payroll_tax separately instead of Δhousehold_net_income.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions