With 10 days to go until the dreaded sequester—the automatic across-the-board spending cuts that most lawmakers profess to hate—the Washington drama machine is starting to get in gear. Today, President Obama stood in front a group of uniformed first responders and warned darkly of layoffs if the spending cuts kick in. At the same time, [...]

I spent lunchtime today moderating a thoroughly discouraging Urban Institute panel discussion on the fiscal cliff. The consensus of the speakers—all highly-regarded budget experts—was that the New Year’s cliff deal was pretty lame and the coming round of self-imposed budget crises will be even worse. My Urban Institute colleagues Donald Marron, Rudy Penner, and Bob Reischauer—each of [...]

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 [...]

The Congressional Budget Office’s summer budget update charts two undesirable paths for the nation’s economic and fiscal health next year. Call them Gloom and Doom. Gloom is what happens if the tax increases and government spending cuts scheduled to arrive in January actually occur. CBO says that would drive the economy back into recession in [...]

Don’t tell my Tax Policy Center colleagues I said this, but it isn’t always about taxes. If you listened to the presidential campaign this week, you’d think the very fate of the nation rests on what happens to the 2001/2003 tax cuts. It would be hard to believe otherwise as Mitt Romney’s warns us daily [...]

Given Washington’s endless partisan nastiness—and thanks to some updated estimates by the Congressional Budget Office–it seems like a good time to revisit an old idea: What would happen if Congress and the White House just closed up shop for a couple of years and let fiscal policy run on autopilot? The question is not so [...]