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Tax News
Keep the Bush Tax Cuts for a Couple of Years, But Reshuffle the Dollars
It seems increasingly likely that Congress will extend most, if not all, of the Bush tax cuts for at least a year or two. As the economy shows growing signs of softening, lawmakers are less and less likely to take steps that will be seen as “raising taxes.” But there is a way Congress could main...
Uncompassionate Economics: Blaming Unemployment Compensation for Our Job Woes
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning, Robert Barro lays blame for the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate squarely on President Obama’s doorstep. The outspoken Harvard economist asserts that unemployment would stand at 6.8 percent—well below today’s 9.5 percent—if only the pr...
Obama’s Tax Reform Panel: A Missed Opportunity
You buy what you think will be a state-of-the-art GPS device to give you driving directions. The gizmo was designed by a committee of the nation’s smartest highway engineers. But instead of telling you to turn right now, the e-voice says something like this: “You could turn right now. It would b...
Comments on Social Security Reform
We’ve gotten some interesting comments on our recent post about Social Security reform. In the post, we note that many reform options would slow the growth of benefits from one age cohort to the next, but not cut lifetime benefits relative to what people receive today. We didn’t focus on the spe...
Stand and Deliver: Do Lawmakers Want to Cut the Deficit or Not?
We will soon learn whether all the political talk about controlling the federal deficit is serious or just noise. The next several months will provide an acid test for those pols who are bloviating about out-of control government. My advice: Pay no attention whatever to what they say, just watc...
Save the Making Work Pay Tax Credit but Narrow It
While Washington seems obsessed with the fate of the Bush tax cuts, it has paid little attention to a soon-to-expire Obama tax cut: the Making Work Pay credit (MWP). Like the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, this credit, which was enacted as part of the 2009 stimulus, is also scheduled to expire at the end o...
Will Social Security Reform Cut Benefits?
Will Social Security reform cut benefits? That’s highly unlikely. It’s more likely that reform will simply cut the rate of growth in benefits. Social Security reformers have often thought about reform in terms of the annual benefits they want to give people. The complication wi...
Misrepresenting the Bush Tax Cuts, or the Return of Death Panels
The story goes that when Lyndon Johnson was losing his first congressional election he put out the word that his opponent was having sex with barnyard animals. An aide innocently warned Johnson that this wasn’t true. “Make the SOB deny it,” LBJ was said to have replied. If y...
Between a Fiscal Rock and a Hard Place
The Congressional Budget Office’s annual mid-session update provides some striking evidence of just how challenging today’s fiscal environment is. Because deficits were so high going into the economic slump, and because the financial crash was so steep, Washington must now navigate between two u...
Another View of the Bush Tax Cuts
Adam Looney at the Brookings Institution has a nice new paper on the Bush tax cuts. It can be summarized in this picture: As Adam notes, the argument we are having is “whether to extend all of the tax cuts or merely to extend the vast majority.” Or, to put it a slightly different way: Do we wan...