Treasury Department Archive

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

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares A Democratic framework on a tax plan? Not quite. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced yesterday that the Senate, House, and White House have agreed to a  “framework” on how to pay for the $3.5 trillion spending package they hope to pass this fall under budget reconciliation. But few lawmakers had even seen

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Welcome to the latest episode of the Tax Justice Network’s monthly podcast, the Taxcast. You can subscribe either by emailing naomi [at] taxjustice.net or find us on your podcast app. In this episode, Naomi Fowler explores degrowth and how we liberate ourselves from ‘growthism’ with economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. (The full converation will be released soon as a Taxcast

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Biden tries to broker a deal with Hill Democrats. The President is looking at a confrontation with Republicans over the soon-to-expire debt limit. But he’s also got to try to get warring Democrats on the same page. To that end he began a series of meetings yesterday with Democrats representing multiple factions to

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Key Findings Policymakers should carefully analyze tax expenditures before categorizing one as a loophole—some tax expenditures are important structural elements of the tax code while others are unsound. Generally, if a provision is broadly available and helps to eliminate the double taxation of saving, or broadly contributes to a consumption tax base, it

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares As Congress debates next steps on the tax provisions in the Build Back Better Act proposed in the House Ways and Means Committee, it is important to consider the economic impacts, which include reduced economic output, wages, and jobs. Due to the plan’s economically costly and inefficient tax increases, we find that long-run

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Key Findings States have paid out $175 billion in unemployment benefits since the start of the pandemic, with the federal government providing an additional $660 billion. Taking debt into account, state trust funds now have a negative aggregate balance of -$11 billion and are $115 billion shy of minimum adequate solvency levels. States