President Obama says Governor Romney will cut taxes for high-income households by $250,000. Romney counters that under his plan, the rich will pay the same share of taxes they do today. Who’s right? It all depends on what plan you are looking at and what you are measuring. The first problem is the two candidates [...]

The breathlessly-hyped debate between President Obama and Governor Romney left me with an empty feeling. There were many words–oh, there were words– but even the most casual observer of the campaign has heard most of them before. Yet when it comes to economic policy,  I learned almost nothing new about how either Romney or Obama would govern over the next [...]

Yesterday, Kevin Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute economist and informal adviser to Mitt Romney, insisted that Romney would not raise taxes on low- and middle-income households in order to finance his promised 20 percent across-the-board rate cut. Nor would those rate cuts increase the deficit. Instead, Kevin predicted that if Congress did not trim tax [...]

About that 47 percent: Let me introduce you to Andrea. When I met her a couple of years ago, she was a home health aide who typically worked six days-a-week and often put in 50 hours. She loved her work, but it is not something most of us would want to do. According to the [...]

If only Mitt Romney had paid attention to Ronald Reagan. There are so many things the former Massachusetts governor could learn from the former California governor’s presidential campaigns. But I have in mind only one lesson not learned—how Reagan ran on tax reform in 1984. Reagan only cautiously embraced the idea of rewriting the tax [...]

Yes, political conventions are costly anachronisms. But, with patience and time, one can learn quite a lot about a political party by watching, or reading, what the confab produces. Thus, a few thoughts about the GOP and fiscal policy as Republicans decamp from Tampa: Mitt Romney: In last night’s acceptance speech, he sketched out his [...]

In a recent paper, we showed that any revenue-neutral tax reform that included Governor Romney’s specific tax cuts and that met his stated goal of not raising taxes on saving and investment would cut taxes for households with income above $200,000 and would therefore necessarily have to raise taxes on taxpayers below $200,000. This was [...]

As politicians and their allies look for ways to finance tax rate cuts, a surprising option is getting a great deal of attention among conservatives: The tax exemption for municipal bonds. Mitt Romney’s economic adviser Glenn Hubbard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Matt Jensen are among those who in recent weeks [...]

Tax Policy Center’s analysis of Governor Romney’s tax plan has elicited much comment and misinterpretation. In a new paper, Sam Brown, Bill Gale, and Adam Looney clarify what the original paper did and did not say by addressing in a Q and A format some of the questions that have been raised. The authors reemphasize [...]

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 [...]