What the Great Budget Debate Is Really About
Want to know what the Great Budget Debate of 2011 is really about? Ask Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf (who was a Tax Policy Center associate before joining CBO). In testimony to...
View ArticlePick Your Poison: VAT or Higher Income Tax Rates
With congressional deficit reduction efforts largely collapsed, the question remains: What are we going to do about the nation’s long-term budget mess? Since any realistic deficit reduction plan will...
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The “Tax Expirers”
Today I had the chance to testify before the Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee about a perennial challenge, the “tax extenders,” which really ought to be known...
View ArticleHow Eisenhower and Congressional Democrats Balanced a Budget
The election results did not change the political status quo, and the status quo has not been conducive to solving the nation’s festering fiscal problems. In his victory speech President Obama pledged...
View ArticleHow to Control Entitlements: A Challenge Ike Did Not Face
Yesterday, I described President Eisenhower’s remarkable success in turning a large deficit in fiscal 1959 into a balanced budget in 1960. It was one of the biggest fiscal consolidations since World...
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The Sequester is Not Too Big, It is Too Stupid
The latest chapter in Washington’s never-ending fiscal drama is about to play out in tomorrow’s sequester–a word most Americans should never have had to learn. For all the partisan noise about these...
View ArticleSequester, We Hardly Knew Ye
I suspect that by early next week, the sequester will be old news. We’ll be on to the next crisis—the impending government shutdown scheduled for just a month from now. And there may be good reason for...
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What’s the Mix of Spending and Revenue in the President’s Deficit Reduction...
President Obama’s budget identifies a group of policies as a $1.8 trillion deficit reduction proposal. I found the budget presentation of this proposal somewhat confusing; in particular, it is...
View ArticleThe Baucus-Hatch “Blank Slate” Approach to Tax Reform Could Be Revolutionary
No one quite knows what exactly Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-UT) mean when they say they will rely upon a “blank slate” as the starting point...
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The Cruel Political Paradox of Deficit Reduction
I was chatting the other day with a fellow budget wonk who noted the cruel paradox of fiscal politics: When the economy is bad, deficits rise and the public support for reducing them grows. Yet a poor...
View ArticleForgotten but Not Gone: The Long-Term Fiscal Imbalance
Over the past few years, the long-term fiscal situation has improved. With the passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (in early January, 2013), the Budget Control Act of 2011, the...
View ArticleCRFB’s New Online Budget Simulator
Neither Congress nor the White House seem to care much about the budget deficit these days, but if you do, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has created an updated online budget simulator...
View ArticleDynamic Scoring Forum: Three Things You Should Know About Dynamic Scoring
This is one of a series of guest TaxVox blog posts discussing dynamic scoring. The House recently changed the rules of budget scoring: The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on...
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