Tax Policy Center

The Tax Policy Center is a joint venture between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, and its newsletter distills the center's research on how tax policy actually plays out: who bears the burden of a given proposal, what a rate change does to federal revenue, how state codes interact with federal ones. It's wonkish by design, written by economists for people who want the numbers behind the political rhetoric.

If you otherwise only read partisan tax commentary, this is a useful corrective, since the modeling is rigorous and the center has no stake in whether a given bill passes. Policy staffers, journalists covering budget fights, and anyone trying to understand a proposal's real distributional effects get the most from it.