One of the primary reasons America’s tax revenues remain low relative to other industrialized countries is our use of special tax preferences, or “tax expenditures,” that provide individuals and businesses with opportunities to reduce their tax bills by undertaking certain actions. The magnitude of tax expenditures is comparable to the largest government spending programs; in total, they are about 8 percent of GDP. The mortgage interest deduction and similar tax breaks are referred to as “tax expenditures” because they add to the deficit to subsidize certain activities, just as some spending programs do. Eliminating or limiting tax expenditures could raise revenues to reduce the federal deficit or to facilitate lower tax rates. However, reining in tax expenditures will not be easy. First, many tax expenditures serve important purposes, such as offsetting the tax burden on working families or promoting health insurance coverage. Additionally, the largest tax expenditures—such as the tax breaks for mortgage interest, health care, and retirement savings, and reduced rates for capital gains—are also the most entrenched tax expenditures, and are defended by a broad base of vocal stakeholders.

Recent Charts

A substantial share of American workers must obtain a license from a state or local government to work in their professions. The share of workers nationwide required to have a license has risen dramatically since the 1950s, from just 5 percent to nearly 30 percent in 2008. This chart shows the share of the workforce that is licensed in every state based on estimates from a Harris poll conducted in the first half of 2013.

Each month, The Hamilton Project calculates America’s “jobs gap,” or the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while accounting for changes in the population. In this chart, The Hamilton Project applies the same jobs gap methodology to earlier recessions in 1981–82, 1990–91, 2001, and 2007–09.

Each month, The Hamilton Project calculates America’s “jobs gap,” or the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while absorbing the people who newly enter the labor force each month. As of the end of February 2015, our nation faces a jobs gap of 4.0 million jobs.

There is considerable regional variation in per capita domestic water use, which includes indoor uses (e.g., drinking, flushing toilets, preparing food, showering, and washing clothes and dishes) as well as outdoor uses (e.g., watering lawns and gardens and washing cars).

Solutions to the country’s growing water challenges lie, in part, with the development and adoption of new innovative technologies. Yet, in comparison to the clean energy sector, innovation in the water sector has remained low. Using the numbers of patents filed in clean energy and water purification as indicators, the clean energy sector has exhibited a much higher rate of innovation over the past decade.

The U.S. fishing industry contributed approximately $90 billion to the economy in 2012. This contribution is split between commercial and recreational fishing—$59.0 billion and $30.4 billion, respectively.