House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) fiscal plan promises to balance the federal budget in 10 years, make major cuts in income tax rates for both individuals and corporations, and raise the same amount of revenue as current law. If House Republicans want to do all three, they will have to eliminate trillions of [...]

Paul Ryan is often identified as a deficit hawk. And while he regularly talks about the importance of balanced budgets, that’s not what matters most to the GOP’s soon-to-be vice presidential nominee. Ryan’s holy grail is low taxes and small government, not fiscal balance. Those priorities are clear in the fiscal plan Ryan wrote for the [...]

Already, the Romney campaign insists that voters should pay no attention to Paul Ryan’s fiscal agenda.  It is the Romney-Ryan tax and budget plan, they say, not the Ryan-Romney plan. Good luck with that. Both Democrats and conservative Republicans will spend the next three months arguing otherwise. And like them or not, Ryan’s more comprehensive—and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There is lots we still don’t know about GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry’s tax and budget plan. But I am pretty sure of one thing: The proposal he released today would result in a massive tax cut and, combined with his vow to balance the federal budget by 2020, implies huge reductions in federal spending.  Perry, [...]

I should be doing my taxes, but instead I’m writing this column. When I’m done with that, maybe I’ll do some ironing. I’d do anything to postpone tax filing. It’s just so darn complicated! Ironically, perhaps, I’m something of a tax expert. I was a top tax official in President Clinton’s Treasury Department and cofounded [...]

If you view a budget as a vision of government, the House GOP’s fiscal map unveiled today charts a profound course correction for Washington and its relationships with both its citizens and the states. In this new world, individuals and families would receive only limited assistance from government in times of stress, but they also might [...]