Retirement Savings Tax Expenditures: The Need for Refundable Tax Credits at the Federal and State Level

Teresa Ghilarducci, Joelle Saad-Lessler, Ismael Cid-Martinez and Bridget Fisher
Additional contact information
Bridget Fisher: Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org

No 2015-04, SCEPA policy note series. from Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School

Abstract: Despite spending $100 billion a year in retirement tax breaks, the U.S. faces a retirement income security crisis. Though federal tax breaks for 401(k) plans and IRA plans are known to be ineffective and regressive, until now no one has documented the nearly $20 billion states spend on the same ineffective tax breaks. If federal and state tax deferrals for retirement accounts were transformed to refundable tax credits and deposited into Guaranteed Retirement Accounts, every worker would have an average of over $647 per year in retirement savings from the federal government, with an additional $172 going to those who live in states with income taxes.

Keywords: Retirement; 401(k); Sponsorship; Tax Credits; Federal; State (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 E21 H55 J26 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs ... Tax_Expenditures.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epa:cepapn:2015-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SCEPA policy note series. from Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bridget Fisher ().