Progressivity of the personal income tax schedule, including top marginal rates, bracket spread, and targeted credits (EITC-equivalents).
Statutory and effective corporate tax rates, treatment of depreciation, and international competitiveness.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 collapsed the federal individual income tax bracket structure to two rates (15 and 28 percent), broadened the base by curtailing tax shelters and passive-loss deductions, lowered the top corporate rate from 46 to 34 percent, and equalised treatment of ordinary and capital gains income. Designed as a revenue-neutral simplification, it was the signature bipartisan tax reform of the Reagan era and was preceded by the 1981 ERTA rate cuts.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.