Last Thursday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner presented Congress with the Obama administration’s plan intended to avert the impending fiscal cliff. The plan was, quite literally, laughable. It called for $50 Billion in new stimulus spending, the end of Congressional authority to raise the debt limit, $1.6 Trillion in new revenues from higher taxes on the … Continue reading
The impending American debt crisis has almost nothing to do with taxes. If the Democrats get their way on the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts, roughly $65 Billion in revenue would be raised (assuming that this tax increase would have zero negative effect on economic growth – a disputable point, to be sure). … Continue reading
Experts agree that healthcare entitlement reform is key to curbing costs and boosting quality, yet we seem to ignore one of our biggest, less obvious, entitlements in the discussion. After Medicare and Medicaid, the employer sponsored health insurance tax exemption is the government’s biggest expenditure on healthcare, costing us around $260 billion a year. It … Continue reading
One of the most contentious points in the two presidential debates, and really the focal point of this campaign, has been Mitt Romney’s tax proposal. Governor Romney’s proposal, a summary of which you can read here, is essentially to reduce income taxes for all Americans by 20%, eliminate interest, dividends, and capital gains taxes for … Continue reading
“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” – Albert Einstein Mitt Romney has a tax plan. He wants to lower tax rates for everyone and get rid of some tax deductions. The details of the plan and who will be benefit are hotly debated topics and seemingly an entire industry has … Continue reading
The period between March 1991 and March 2001 was the longest continuous expansion in U.S. economic history, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. But the sunset of this period, with the bursting of the Dot Com bubble and the attacks on 9/11, marked the beginning of a two-year recession. In response, the Bush … Continue reading
By Logan Albright In the context of mounting concerns over the rapidly increasing national debt, the issue of tax revenue is frequently raised. Currently, revenue from federal taxes is at about 14.4% of GDP. Add in state and local taxes and this number rise to 24%. What does this mean in the broader international and … Continue reading
By Will Portman The U.S. needs deficit reduction, but there’s such thing as too much of a good thing — or, in the case of the end-of-year “fiscal cliff” the country is approaching, implementing too much of a good thing much too quickly. In the absence of congressional action, a slew of tax increases and spending … Continue reading
By Will Portman The Occupy movement has brought income inequality to the forefront of the national political discussion over the past year, even if both the movement and the issue have faded in recent months. Occupy protestors are concerned about the growing wealth gap in the U.S., pointing to studies like the recent Congressional Budget Office … Continue reading
By Will Portman Winston Churchill once said, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) cited the late British Prime Minister’s famous quote this week as he unveiled The Path to Prosperity, his budget for fiscal year 2013, arguing … Continue reading
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