The Tax Calculator is a calculator for the US federal individual income tax system. In conjunction with micro data that represents US taxpayer characteristics and a set of behavioral assumptions, we use the Tax Calculator to conduct revenue estimation and distributional analyses of tax policies.

Documentation for the Tax calculator is available at http://taxcalc.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.

The Open-Source Policy Center (OSPC) seeks to make policy analysis more transparent, trustworthy, and collaborative by harnessing open-source methods to build cutting-edge economic models.

The Tax-Calculator is currently under development. Users should be forewarned that the API could change significantly. Additionally, the implementation is subject to wild change. Therefore, there is NO GUARANTEE OF ACCURACY. THE CODE SHOULD NOT CURRENTLY BE USED FOR PUBLICATIONS, JOURNAL ARTICLES, OR RESEARCH PURPOSES. Essentially, you should assume the calculations are unreliable until we finish the code re-architecture and have checked the results against other existing implementations of the tax code. The package will have released versions, which will be checked against existing code prior to release. Stay tuned for an upcoming release!

The taxcalc package is installable via python setup.py install. We currently test against Python 2.7 and 3.4. You can install the latest conda package via

conda install -c ospc taxcalc

which will grab the latest taxcalc package from binstar.org. Currently, we host Python 2.7 and 3.4 packages for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

For contributors, the conda recipe is located in the conda.recipe directory. You can build the conda package via the conda build command:

conda build --python 3.4 conda.recipe/

To learn more about the conda package manager, go to conda.pydata.org.