About the Blogger. Tax Tracking is put together by Mark Booth. Over his career he has extensively analyzed the state of U.S. tax collections and methods for forecasting the amount of those federal revenues into the future. He completed a 31-year career at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), serving the last half of that time as the chief of the unit responsible for the agency’s revenue estimates. In that role, he supervised the production of the agency’s 10-year projections of the different components of federal revenues, including the separate estimates of the effects of changes in tax and other laws affecting revenues. Before that, he was responsible for producing the agency’s projections of revenues from individual and corporate income taxes. Prior to his federal service, he spent four years as a macroeconomist at Data Resources, Inc. (DRI), working on its forecasts of the U.S. economy as both a staff economist and research assistant.
Since leaving federal service, Booth continues to track U.S. tax collections and believes that they can provide important real-time clues about the state of the U.S. economy, especially wage income. He also earned a financial planning designation, Chartered Financial Consultant®, from the American College of Financial Services. He undertakes projects through Booth Financial Consulting LLC.
Mark holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Wesleyan University and Brown University, respectively.
About the Blog. This blog is intended to examine real-time data on federal tax collections and relate them to the U.S. economy. The idea is for posts analyzing withholding and wages at a few points during a month: after the BLS employment report is released; in the middle of the month to assess withholding during that first half; and late in the month when we have an estimate of withholding growth for the full month–several days before the employment report is released. In addition, posts are planned to assess the release of other data, such as federal receipts and refunds during the tax filing season and at other times, and releases of different wage measures.
Mark and his withholding data are also available for consulting projects. Feel free to email him directly with any questions at mark@boothconsult.com.
Much of the withholding data analysis presented on this website is based on proprietary data filtering methods that are described in general terms in the methodology section.