On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on “Extenders and Tax Reform: Seeking Long-Term Solutions.”  It’s about time!  The charade of annual or biennial debate about perpetually “expiring” tax provisions is terrible tax policy and a symbol of our failure to come to terms with budget reality. If you need help sleeping, download the Joint [...]

A well-designed Value-Added Tax could simplify the tax code for most households and finance significant reductions in corporate and individual income tax rates without adding to the budget deficit. And it could be a key piece of a revenue system that is both progressive and less intrusive in economic decisions than today’s law. That’s the [...]

If we are going to reduce the medium- and long-deficit, new tax revenues must be part of the solution. And those taxes must be progressive and as conducive to economic growth as possible. Historical revenue levels will not be sufficient to fund the federal government in the future. We will need to control the ballooning [...]

Rick Santorum, who may have won the Iowa caucuses after all, favors a huge broad-based tax cut that would massively increase the budget deficit. According to new estimates by my colleagues at the Tax Policy Center, the former Pennsylvania senator would cut taxes for nearly all households making $40,000 or more. But the impact on the [...]

As state legislatures return for what promises to be yet another difficult budget year, they ought to be starting to refill their rainy day funds–those accounts that set aside money for future hard times. That’s a tough decision. After all, for the past three years, states have been raising taxes and cutting spending just to [...]

The least popular Congress in memory is back.  I, personally, am thrilled. After a year in which lawmakers did almost nothing besides (barely) keeping the government running, this session promises hardly more.  Tax policy will be at the center of much of the partisan squabbling, but it is hard to imagine Congress achieving more than a temporary [...]

With Rick Santorum surging in Iowa, it is a good time to take a look at his tax agenda. While his revenue plan has received almost no attention, it plays a  major role in his “faith, family and freedom” campaign. His playbook: lower rates for individuals and corporations, substantially cut taxes on capital, and increase the personal [...]

In two days, 53 targeted tax breaks will, officially at least, die. By the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation’s count, that’s the number of temporary tax subsidies that are due to expire on December 31. They’ve become known as the extenders, which sounds like the name of a wonky rock band but isn’t. They got [...]

It is that time of year when we celebrate with family, remember all we have to be thankful for, and scramble to squeeze out those last few dollars of tax deductible charitable gifts. And that got me thinking about the tax treatment of charities and other non-profits.   It is surely true that we give [...]

With apologies to Charles Dickens, I’d like to tell a Tale of Two States. Earlier this month, on December 5, California Governor Jerry Brown and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo both announced that, even though state revenues in general were rebounding, they were both facing budget shortfalls.  This isn’t totally surprising since earlier in the [...]