Europe is undergoing a massive political upheaval. You may have noticed. Caught in the wake of deep recession, painfully high unemployment, bank failures, and growing demands for fiscal austerity by the bond markets, governments across the continent are collapsing. In November, voters in Spain dumped a Socialist government for the conservatives. Last weekend in France, [...]

It has sometimes been said, even by me, that the easiest way for Congress and the White House to fix the deficit is to do… nothing. Allow the 2001/2003/2010 tax cuts to expire as scheduled in eight months, let the automatic spending cuts enacted in 2011 kick in as planned and, voila, the short-term fiscal [...]

In a new study, Chuck Blahous, who is a public trustee for Medicare and Social Security, concludes that the 2010 health law will add at least $340 billion to the federal deficit from 2012-2021. This is contrary to the official estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, which initially figured the Affordable Care Act would reduce the [...]

The budget proposal House Budget Committee Chairman  Paul Ryan (R-WI) released last week  is, essentially, an effort to have low- and middle-class households bear the entire burden of closing the fiscal gap and bear the costs of financing an additional tax cut for high income households.  The Tax Policy Center (which I co-direct) analyzed the [...]

When we talk about the federal budget, we usually rely on the government’s official definition of “spending” which is to say the amount of money that’s run through federal agencies. But, in reality, the federal government spends a lot more than that. Using a broader definition of spending, which includes hundreds of billions in dollars [...]

No surprise here, but the tax cuts in Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget plan would result in huge benefits for high-income people and very modest—or no— benefits for low income working households, according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center. TPC looked only at the tax reductions in Ryan’s plan, which also included offsetting–but unidentified–cuts [...]

Paul Ryan may not have intended it, but his 2013 budget is the strongest argument I’ve seen for why any serious fiscal plan must include new revenues. It’s far more convincing than partisan Democratic complaints. Ryan says he wants to balance the budget only by cutting spending. But he proved with hard, relatively specific numbers [...]

Republicans like to say President Obama is a chronic, unrepentant tax-raiser. Obama himself used to say he was a tax-cutter but now touts himself as a fiscally responsible steward of the budget who would raise taxes—but only on the rich. Who is right? The Tax Policy Center has just completed its analysis of tax proposals [...]

I am weary of mystery meat.  The latest serving was dished out today by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who released a fiscal plan that airily promises both trillions of dollars in tax cuts and a nearly balanced budget within a decade, but never says how he’d get there. Ryan isn’t saying that [...]

Why do we bother with government trust funds? As the Senate’s just-passed highway bill proved yet again, Congress is turning these funds into little more than accounting shams. In theory, it makes sense to establish special accounts where designated revenues are set aside for a specific purpose. But in practice, Washington is grossly abusing the [...]