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 [...]

Mitt Romney has proposed massive new tax cuts and promised to balance the federal budget. How will he achieve these seemingly contradictory goals? For now, he isn’t saying. And, in fact, his campaign has been sending out vague and somewhat conflicting signals about where the money would come from to finance his rate cuts and [...]

The Tax Policy Center has updated its analysis of Mitt Romney’s platform to reflect his proposed new tax cuts. And the result: Lower taxes for nearly everyone. The highest-income households would pay significantly less, while few with the lowest incomes would benefit.  And without offsetting revenue increases or new spending cuts, Romney’s plan would significantly [...]

The President’s new Framework for Business Tax Reform is two documents in one. The first diagnoses the many flaws in America’s business tax system, and the second offers a framework for fixing them. Much of the resulting commentary has focused on the policy recommendations. But I’d like to give a shout out to the diagnosis. [...]

The other day, I criticized the unwillingness of Congress to finance the latest extension of the payroll tax cut. Since that blog, the Congressional Budget Office released its estimates of the cost of the entire mini-stimulus, including the so-called “doc fix” and changes in unemployment compensation. And the games were even worse than I feared. [...]

In the current issue of the journal The International Economy, ten economic thinkers shared their views on how best to restructure the tax system. Their opinions crossed the political spectrum, ranging from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) to the Economic Policy Institute’s Andrew Fieldhouse. Two of my Tax Policy Center colleagues—TPC director Donald Marron [...]

The new 2013 budget unveiled by President Obama on Monday again contains the Automatic IRA, which was developed by Brookings’ Retirement Security Project in conjunction with The Heritage Foundation. This year’s  version includes an important change that will also encourage more employers to offer a 401(k) account to their workers. However, important changes to the [...]

It looks like Congress is about to assume its default position: In the face of an intractable partisan dispute over how to pay for a government initiative, don’t. If Democrats won’t cut spending, and Republicans refuse to raise anybody’s taxes, there is always the solution they both can agree upon—just borrow the money and increase [...]

Amidst the myriad proposals in President Obama’s budget are two “big ideas” that would raise revenue in a progressive manner without raising taxes. These important ideas should be emphasized in the discussion of tax and fiscal reform that the country should be having and will have to have sooner or later.  (The President also proposes [...]