Distributional analysis of prospective 2009 US individual income taxes: current law and the candidates’ tax plans

The purpose of this paper is to compare the distributional characteristics of two presidential candidates’ proposed reforms to the US federal individual income tax. Using an anonymous sample of tax return data from the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center and the Center’s simulations of 2009 tax law and the two proposals, we compare the vertical and horizontal equity of the three individual income tax regimes. Surprisingly, there is very little difference among the three proposed individual income tax regimes in terms of vertical and horizontal equity. However, when the initial effective tax rate positions and economic incomes of each pair of taxpayers are compared to the new effective tax rate positions under the two proposals, we find that the Obama proposal makes the tax system more progressive than 2009 law. This change is much more pronounced than under the McCain proposal. On the other hand, when these initial positions are compared to the two proposals viz. a viz. horizontal equity, the McCain proposed tax system is more horizontally equitable than 2009 tax law, and more horizontally equitable than the Obama proposal is when compared to 2009 tax law.Tax equity; McCain tax plan; Obama tax plan

Improving public education through strengthened local control

Education

The Evolution of Post-Starburst Galaxies from z∼1z\sim1 to the Present

Post-starburst galaxies are in the transitional stage between blue, star-forming galaxies and red, quiescent galaxies, and therefore hold important clues for our understanding of galaxy evolution. In this paper, we systematically searched for and identified a large sample of post-starburst galaxies from the spectroscopic dataset of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 9. In total, we found more than 6000 objects with redshifts between $z\sim0.05$ and $z\sim1.3$, making this the largest sample of post-starburst galaxies in the literature. We calculated the luminosity function of the post-starburst galaxies using two uniformly selected subsamples: the SDSS Main Galaxy Sample and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey CMASS Sample. The luminosity functions are reasonably fit by half-Gaussian functions. The peak magnitudes shift as a function of redshift from $M\sim-23.5$ at $z\sim0.8$ to $M\sim-20.3$ at $z\sim0.1$. This is consistent with the downsizing trend, whereby more massive galaxies form earlier than low-mass galaxies. We compared the mass of the post-starburst stellar population found in our sample to the decline of the global star-formation rate and found that only a small amount ($\sim1\%$) of all star-formation quenching in the redshift range $z=0.2-0.7$ results in post-starburst galaxies in the luminosity range our sample is sensitive to. Therefore, luminous post-starburst galaxies are not the place where most of the decline in star-formation rate of the universe is happening.Comment: 26 pages, 24 figures, 8 tables. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa