TaxVox proudly presents its 2012 Lump of Coal awards, Thelma and Louise edition, for the worst fiscal policy ideas of the year. The winners are: 10. California. The Golden State probably deserves a lifetime achievement Lump of Coal Award for its inability to balance its budgets, its government-by-initiative, and its endless bouts of fiscal wishful [...]

With fiscal cliff talks seemingly stalled (at least today) , there has been growing talk that House Republicans would call President Obama’s bluff and simply pass the Middle-class Tax Cut Act approved by the Senate last summer. But for all the chatter, nobody has paid much attention to what is, and is not, in that bill. [...]

The Tax Policy Center (TPC) has estimated that going over the fiscal cliff will raise taxes on average by about $3,500 per household in tax year 2013, compared with extension of 2011 tax law. But tens of millions of Americans have a much more immediate problem. They’ll face a huge tax increase when they file [...]

Despite the ideological hype over revenue increases for the upper-income taxpayers and restricting itemized tax deductions, almost all the considered changes will tackle only a portion of the deficit. As the graph below indicates, the Congressional Budget Office projects a fiscal year 2015 deficit under current policy of $883 billion, not far from the $1 [...]

President Obama and administration officials have offered two different revenue targets for the fiscal cliff debate: $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion (sometimes reported as $1.5 trillion). You might be wondering (I was) where those numbers come from. The $1 Trillion President Obama wants to extend the majority of the Bush-era individual income tax cuts—enacted in [...]

At his press conference yesterday, President Obama said it is nearly impossible to raise taxes on the wealthy (a key piece of his fiscal strategy) without increasing their tax rates. It is, Obama said, a matter of simple arithmetic.   But a look at some very rough numbers suggests that if the president and congressional [...]

Barack Obama has pulled off the easy part. He got re-elected. Now, he faces a second term full of painful choices. You could see it in his campaign, which focused more on Mitt Romney’s flaws than on what the president would do in the next four years. Much of this, I suspect, was the result [...]

With the U.S. facing huge domestic policy challenges, one might have hoped for a serious debate on fiscal issues between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. One would have been deeply disappointed. Rather than framing what seem to be profoundly different views of government, the candidates chose to double-down on what Bill Clinton memorably called the [...]

After all the promises and finger-pointing, the presidential campaign is nearly over. But since the race has shed more heat than light on how each of the candidates would govern, I thought it would be useful to describe exactly what Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have pledged to do on tax policy if elected on [...]

When it comes to taxes, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are almost perfect mirror images of one another. Here are ten ways their tax plans are different. Romney’s tax agenda is ambitious and opaque. Obama’s is modest but relatively transparent. Obama has shown little interest in broad-based tax reform. Romney wants to fundamentally rewrite the [...]