by Alex Durante, Cody Kallen, Huaqun Li, William McBride and Garrett Watson at The Tax Foundation
Last-week’s Democrat-sponsored Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), successor to the House-passed Build Back Better Act of late 2021, has been touted by President Biden to, among other things, help reduce the country’s crippling inflation. Using the Tax Foundation’s General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.1 percent and eliminate about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States. It would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run.
By reducing long-run economic growth, this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy.
Our analysis contains estimates of the budgetary, economic, and distributional impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act as specified in bill text provided on July 27.
Using the General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that the tax provisions, IRS enforcement, and drug pricing provisions in the bill would increase federal revenues by about $656 billion over the budget window, before accounting for $352 billion in expanded tax credits for individuals and businesses, resulting in a net revenue increase of about $304 billion from 2022 to 2031.
Excluding the anticipated revenue from increased tax compliance and the drug pricing provisions, the bill would lose about $126 billion in revenue over the budget window.
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