Imputations for Expanded Income

[MattHJensen]

Our distributional tables currently use AGI as the tab variable. Instead, they should use an "expanded income" measure that more accurately reflects economic well being.

Our first step should be to get close to JCT's measure of expanded income. We should be able to get the data from the source listed in the parenthesis.

Expanded income =
Adjusted gross income (puf)

• tax-exempt interest (puf)
• workers' compensation (cps)
• nontaxable social security benefits (puf: gross-taxable)
• excluded income of U.S. citizens living abroad (?)
• value of Medicare benfits in excess of premiums paid (?)
• minimum tax preferences (puf or OTA paper)
• employer contributions for health plans (aligned MEPS + CPS)
• employer contributions to life insurance (?)
• employer share of payroll taxes (puf)

The main outstanding items are

• Aggregate all of the items from the puf
• Impute minimum tax preferences from OTA paper
• Impute employer contributions for health plans
• Find and exploit sources for the ?s

Useful docs:

• JCT: Overview of the definition of income used by the staff of the joint committee on taxation in distributional analyses
• TPC: Measuring income for distributional analysis

Note that Tax Foundation uses AGI as a tab variable.

This is moved from PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator#222

[MattHJensen]

One option might be to model our work off of the imputations that John employs for the CPS file.

[MattHJensen]

Checking off "Impute minimum tax preferences from OTA paper" since @martinholmer is accomplishing the same by adding an imputation of minimum tax preferences off of the puf (cmbtp) to our expanded income measure in PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator#1057. It's an elegant solution.

[martinholmer]

Over two years ago on 2016-Aug-09 in taxdata issue #35 (having to do with including more items in expanded_income, @MattHJensen said:

The main outstanding items are:

• Aggregate all of the items from the puf
• Impute minimum tax preferences from OTA paper
• [] Impute employer contributions for health plans
• [] Find and exploit sources for the [items above marked with a] ?

Missing from this list (at least for PUF data) was:

• [] Impute employee elective deferrals to defined-contribution (DC) pension plans

However, pull request #279 does this PUF imputation of pension contributions, and therefore, a coming Tax-Calculator pull request will add pension contributions into expanded_income.

@MattHJensen

[MattHJensen]

Thanks a lot @martinholmer