Federal Budget and Economy Archive

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares The federal government and many state and local governments are placing equity at the forefront of their pandemic relief efforts. But to effectively follow through on this important goal, policymakers can learn from initiatives undertaken in response to the Great Recession. In a new research brief, we described lessons from the 2009 American

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares A key issue in the congressional debate over President Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) plan is how it would affect the economy over the next couple of years. Identifying precise effects is unusually difficult due to the economic circumstances stemming from the pandemic. But the bill’s overall short-run effects on both growth and

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares The murder of George Floyd, in May 2020, sparked a national reckoning and renewed attention to issues of racial equity and justice. This long-overdue awakening led me to read extensively about racism and to think about interactions between race and tax policy. In a new paper, “Public Finance and Racism” I explore some

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Coal miners increasingly are victims of a cruel paradox. Even as production declines, more are suffering from deadly black lung disease. Yet falling production and growing efforts to combat climate change will slash the federal funds to support sick workers and their families. This problem can be resolved, but it will require policymakers

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Policymakers and even policy analysts often consider the progressivity of specific proposals independently from the broader systems in which they operate. Consequently, they often leave the public with a misleading impression of how those proposals affect various income groups. Here are four examples of how specific programs might appear to be regressive yet

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares When Congress increases spending and cuts taxes then fails to extend the nation’s debt limit, it effectively orders the president to run deficits while prohibiting him from borrowing the money needed to support those deficits. It requires the executive to defy the laws of logic and arithmetic, as well as the law of

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Welcome to Fall. The season where, predicably, the weather gets cooler, the leaves change color, and Congress puts on its annual fiscal crisis. This year, we all get to watch a quadruple-header: Will Congress pass a $1 trillion—or perhaps $552 billion– infrastructure bill? Will Congress approve a massive social spending bill including major