There is an obvious solution to Washington’s perpetual budget crisis. But it is unlikely to happen because all the incentives—both political and economic—are completely wrong. First, the solution: The core of a deal was framed last December, when President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were on the verge of a long-term fiscal agreement that would have cut [...]

Everyone trying to sort out the fiscal cliff deal is getting hopelessly tangled in budget baselines.  Are taxes going up? Or are they going down?  There is an easier way: Forget the multiple baselines. Just look at what is happening to total spending and total revenues. My Tax Policy Center colleagues ran the numbers and they tell [...]

If 2012 was the year of modest economic recovery and surprising Democratic election success, 2013 may be the year of perpetual fiscal policy crisis. After watching the still-unresolved partisan battle over the fiscal cliff, it is increasingly hard to imagine Congress and President Obama reaching anything like a big budget deal next year. Instead, it [...]

TaxVox proudly presents its 2012 Lump of Coal awards, Thelma and Louise edition, for the worst fiscal policy ideas of the year. The winners are: 10. California. The Golden State probably deserves a lifetime achievement Lump of Coal Award for its inability to balance its budgets, its government-by-initiative, and its endless bouts of fiscal wishful [...]

Somehow, the fiscal cliff tax debate has taken a truly weird turn. No, not the politics, which long ago became a parody of Washington deal-making at its worst. It is the policy that has gotten strange: Democrats and Republicans seem hell-bent on protecting millions of high-income people from deficit-cutting tax hikes. President Obama started all [...]

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner may be close to agreeing on a plan that, among other things, would revise the way government programs are adjusted for inflation. Most attention is focused on what this means for Social Security recipients. But the Tax Policy Center estimates that changing the cost-of-living measure would also result [...]

With fiscal cliff talks seemingly stalled (at least today) , there has been growing talk that House Republicans would call President Obama’s bluff and simply pass the Middle-class Tax Cut Act approved by the Senate last summer. But for all the chatter, nobody has paid much attention to what is, and is not, in that bill. [...]

If income tax deductions are capped or limited—an idea that often comes up in the debate over both the fiscal cliff and long-run tax reform—the biggest losers could well be charities. At a time when the government role in providing a safety net may shrink, many of these groups may become increasingly important.  Yet deduction [...]

Congress and President Obama can’t agree on much, but they agree on this: Congress must preserve what they persist in calling middle-class tax cuts. As most TaxVox readers know by now, the red lines in this debate are for singles making about $200,000 or less and couples filing jointly making $250,000 or less. By this standard [...]

President Obama and administration officials have offered two different revenue targets for the fiscal cliff debate: $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion (sometimes reported as $1.5 trillion). You might be wondering (I was) where those numbers come from. The $1 Trillion President Obama wants to extend the majority of the Bush-era individual income tax cuts—enacted in [...]