Last week I argued that budgeting for Medicare’s hospital insurance program is flawed. Today, I offer two ways to fix it (and reject a third). Medicare Part A is one of several federal programs that control spending through a “belt and suspenders” combination of regular program rules (the belt) and an overall limit (the suspenders). But [...]

The recent double-counting dispute isn’t just about politics; it also reveals a flaw in budgeting for Medicare Part A. Budget experts are waging a spirited battle over the Medicare changes that helped pay for 2010’s health reform. In April, Chuck Blahous, one of two public trustees of the program, released a study arguing that the [...]

In a new study, Chuck Blahous, who is a public trustee for Medicare and Social Security, concludes that the 2010 health law will add at least $340 billion to the federal deficit from 2012-2021. This is contrary to the official estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, which initially figured the Affordable Care Act would reduce the [...]

There is more to the Affordable Care Act than the individual mandate. There are also, for example, taxes. And since this is TaxVox, I thought it would be useful to think about some of those revenue provisions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s three-day hearing on the fate of the ACA. The law includes [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

We’ve all seen the articles in Forbes, Kiplingers, or U.S. News trumpeting the best states to live in retirement. A key measure for them all: Low taxes. What you may not know is that states actively compete with one another to provide tax breaks to older residents—especially to wealthy seniors. This competiton is similar to the way [...]

On a day when Washington partisans couldn’t even figure out (yet again) how to keep the government running, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) did a remarkable thing: They announced a bipartisan plan to fix Medicare, probably the most contentious of policy issues. And amazingly, what they came up [...]

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, [...]

Want to know what the Great Budget Debate of 2011 is really about? Ask Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf (who was a Tax Policy Center associate before joining CBO). In testimony to Congress’s  fiscal super committee on Tuesday, Doug put the whole thing into a few simple sentences: “I think really the fundamental question…is…where [...]