For this PSL demo-day I showed how to use the Tax-Brain web-application, hosted on Compute Studio, to analyze proposed individual income tax policies. Tax-Brain integrates the Tax-Calculator and Behavioral-Responses models to make running both static and dynamic analyses of the US federal income and payroll taxes simple. The web interface for the model makes it possible for anyone to run their own analyses without writing a single line of code.
We started the demo by simply walking through the interface and features of the web-app before creating our own sample reform to model. This reform, which to my knowledge does not reflect any proposals currently up for debate, included changes to the income and payroll tax rates, bringing back personal exemptions, modifying the standard deduction, and implementing a universal basic income.
While the model ran, I explained how Tax-Brain validated all of the user inputs, the data behind the model, and how the final tax liability projections are determined. We concluded by looking through the variety of tables and graphs Tax-Brain produces and how they can easily be shared with others.
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