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 [...]

Paul Ryan may not have intended it, but his 2013 budget is the strongest argument I’ve seen for why any serious fiscal plan must include new revenues. It’s far more convincing than partisan Democratic complaints. Ryan says he wants to balance the budget only by cutting spending. But he proved with hard, relatively specific numbers [...]

I am weary of mystery meat.  The latest serving was dished out today by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who released a fiscal plan that airily promises both trillions of dollars in tax cuts and a nearly balanced budget within a decade, but never says how he’d get there. Ryan isn’t saying that [...]

Mitt Romney has proposed massive new tax cuts and promised to balance the federal budget. How will he achieve these seemingly contradictory goals? For now, he isn’t saying. And, in fact, his campaign has been sending out vague and somewhat conflicting signals about where the money would come from to finance his rate cuts and [...]

Rick Santorum, who may have won the Iowa caucuses after all, favors a huge broad-based tax cut that would massively increase the budget deficit. According to new estimates by my colleagues at the Tax Policy Center, the former Pennsylvania senator would cut taxes for nearly all households making $40,000 or more. But the impact on the [...]

A new Tax Policy Center analysis finds that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would cut taxes for millions of households but bestow most of its benefits on those with the highest incomes. At the same time, it would significantly cut corporate taxes and add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. Compared to current law (assuming [...]

Conservatives like to say that President Obama has been responsible for massive tax increases.  It is wonderful rhetoric that plays to the big tax image Democrats have been saddled with for decades—sometimes with good reason. But for most households, this claim is the economic equivalent of the birther movement: It is as credible to call [...]