Federal Budget and Economy Archive
A First Look At The Revenue Provisions Of Biden’s 2024 Budget
March 9, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares President Biden’s 2024 budget would raise taxes by more than $4.5 trillion over the next decade. And keeping to a pattern Biden began in his 2020 presidential campaign, nearly all the new revenue would come from high-income households and corporations. Biden’s tax agenda never will be approved by the current Congress. The Republican-controlled
What Paul Krugman Gets Wrong About Social Security
March 6, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares People may disagree about whether to raise taxes or limit the growth of benefits to extend the solvency of the Social Security trust funds. But understanding how the program was designed is vital for assessing options for reform. To that end, in a recent column for The New York Times, Paul Krugman made
Proposed FairTax Rate Would Add Trillions to Deficits Over Ten Years
March 1, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares In a deal that secured Kevin McCarthy the speakership, House Republicans plan to vote on the FairTax Act of 2023 (H.R. 25), which would replace almost all federal taxes with a 23 percent national retail sales tax, create a “Family Consumption Allowance,” a type of universal basic income, eliminate the IRS, and create
CBO: $19 Trillion In New Debt Over The Next Decade, Mostly From Programs Nobody Will Cut
February 16, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares The Congressional Budget Office estimates the national debt will increase by $19 trillion over the next decade under current law, $3 trillion more than it projected last May. But for all the squawking in Washington over how to deal with deficits and debt, nearly all of the increases will come in spending Congress
Monitoring the IRS Commissioner Confirmation Hearing? TPC’s Writings Can Help You Prep
February 14, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Valentine’s Day might not be too festive for Danny Werfel this year. He’s got what will probably be the most difficult test of his professional life tomorrow—his confirmation hearing to be IRS Commissioner. The hearing promises to be a doozy, and not only because the IRS is one of the most unpopular government
Congress’s Medicare Financing Mess is Bigger Than You Think
February 6, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares While Congress talks about the federal debt, it’s still hesitating to deal with one major source of rising deficits—Medicare—that it can’t avoid much longer. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) fund expenses increasingly exceed its revenues, and it is scheduled to run out of reserves to help pay for those expenses by 2028. If that
The Effects Of Using New Tax Revenue To Shore Up Medicare’s Finances
February 1, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares How could new tax revenues ease Medicare’s substantial financial pressures? And how would those tax hikes affect federal revenues and the distribution of tax burdens across income groups? A new joint report from the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center and Health Policy Center examines the pros and cons of several plans to increase
Balancing The Federal Budget In 10 Years Without Raising Taxes Is….Impossible
January 17, 2023
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares House Republicans say they want to balance the federal budget in 10 years by cutting spending only, and seem to have received a promise from newly-elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to bring such a plan to the floor for a vote sometime this year. I can’t wait to see what it looks
Playing Russian Roulette With The Federal Debt
December 13, 2022
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Congress should eliminate the debt ceiling this year. It serves no useful purpose. It doesn’t contribute to fiscal discipline, and breaching it entails large, potentially, catastrophic costs. Those risks could become painfully apparent sometime next year. Not only will the current borrowing limit be reached but influential lawmakers already are threatening to hold
Why TPC Revised Its Estimates Of The Business Tax Proposals Pending In the Post-Election Congress
December 7, 2022
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TweetShareSharePin0 Shares The Tax Policy Center has revised its estimates of the revenue cost and distributional effects of the business tax cuts included in its analysis of several tax changes currently pending in the post-election session of Congress. TPC analyzed the effects of eliminating a scheduled phase-down in 100 percent bonus depreciation. However, TPC incorrectly
