Now that we’ve had a few days to absorb the debt limit agreement signed by President Obama on Aug. 2, it might be useful to review what it did– and did not–do. Here’s my Top Ten list. It avoided an economic catastrophe. This can easily be lost in all the noise about caps, triggers, and [...]

What will the debt deal mean for the future of tax reform? Sadly, nothing good. The budget agreement is, for tax reformers, a huge disappointment.  It is based on the fantasy that the nation can return to a sound fiscal footing through spending cuts only.  It entirely ignores the revenue side of the budget. And [...]

As my Tax Policy Center colleague Donald Marron noted the other day, trying to sort through the various baselines in the Gang of Six’s bipartisan Senate budget plan is amusing, but not necessarily helpful. So, I’m going to take a different look: How much money would the government collect over the next decade under the [...]

Should Congress use a new measure of inflation to index the tax code? It sounds awfully technical—and it is—but shifting to what most economists believe is a more accurate measure of inflation would gradually raise a substantial amount of new revenue for politicians scrambling to find ways to cut the deficit. The idea has surfaced [...]

I’m preparing a presentation on our tax system for a group of visiting foreign tax officials and they wanted to know how responsibilities are divided within the federal government.  Seems like a fair question. In other countries, the process is often quite streamlined:  a Ministry of Finance, which makes the political decisions, a Treasury Department, [...]

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 [...]

Remember President Obama’s 2012 budget—the fiscal framework he released in February. You’d be forgiven if you’ve forgotten. After all, Washington can’t seem to stop squabbling over what to do about the budget for this fiscal year, now almost half over. Still, once Congress finally crawls out of the muck of 2011, Obama’s budget will be the focus [...]

Last spring, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the new health legislation would reduce the deficit by $143 billion over ten years. Yesterday, CBO estimated that repealing that legislation would increase the deficit by $230 billion over ten years. What gives? Why would it cost $87 billion more to repeal the law than was saved by enacting [...]