Revenue & Spending

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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more news

Budget Perception Vs. Reality

Apr 17, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Ask a friend (who doesn't do fiscal policy) to sum up the fiscal policy of the Bush era, and more likely than not, they'll tell you it's been one of "big spending." That's been my experience, at least. And Republican presidential candidates seem to be playing off that perception. Many of them have been issuing a call for greater fiscal discipline, achieved by spending restraint and reductions.

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Tax Day 2007 Sampler: Prime Time for the AMT

Apr 16, 2007 by Dana Chasin

As the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) threatens to reach 20 million new taxpayers next year, the issue has now reached readiness for prime time on the editorial pages of the nation's newspapers. Below is a sampler from the many editorials on the AMT that appeared on the weekend before Tax Day 2007: The Star Ledger of New Jersey, on what will truly motivate Congress to end the AMT:

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Important Tax Day Readings

Apr 16, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Check out this NYT article to find out how much people like you are being audited compared to other people. And see the latest release by Syracuse University's TRAC, which had to sue the IRS to get data that shows that it has been strangely unproductive when it audits large corporations.

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Love That Lucre

Apr 16, 2007 by Matt Lewis

You can always count on the Wall Street Journal opinion page to defend anything that rich people do. If all you did was read it, you'd think that whatever is in the interest of the wealthy is also in the interest of the nation. Wealthy people know how to spend money much better than the government. If we just let wealthy people do what they want, everyone will be better off.

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DeMint & Co. to Seek UC on Senate Earmarks Rule

Apr 13, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and four GOP colleagues wrote Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-TN) yesterday that they want the Senate to take up S. Res. 123, a earmarks disclosure rule. The Senate passed a statutory version of the rule unanimously as part of S. 1, the ethics and and lobbying reform bill adopted 96-2 in January. DeMint and Sens. Coburn (OK), Cornyn (TX), Enzi (WY), and Chambliss (GA) said they will seek unanimous consent next Tuesday to consider the measure. As a resolution, it would become an internal rule of the Senate and, unlike S.

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Why Health Care Is So Expensive In the US

Apr 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Why are health care costs rising so fast? In the long-term, that is the most important question before the fiscal policy community. The long-term budget imbalance threatens to do great harm to government programs and the economy, and rising health care costs account for ALL of the spending that outpaces revenues for the foreseeable future. Not Social Security, not entitlements, not an aging population- health care programs, driven by rising prices in the private market.

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The Chunk of Your Tax Bill That Just Doesn't Matter

Apr 12, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The Chaney Fiscal Theorem, which asserts that Deficits Don't Matter, was the dominant view underlying the tax and budget policies of the nation's governing party for most of this decade.

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WSJ Profile: Maverick Max of Montana

Apr 11, 2007 by Dana Chasin

A must-read examination of the challenges facing Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus (D-MT) appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Baucus is currently playing a pivotal role in several significant issues, as we have noted, from AMT to S-CHIP, to the minimum wage small business tax, to the estate tax -- taking sometimes sharply ideologically inconsistent positions, harking back to his support for the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which "infuriated other Democrats."

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How Good Was the Post-WW II era?

Apr 11, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Craig excerpts an interesting article below that reminds us that there was once a time when the median wage tracked productivity- or, as I like to think, a time when people were paid what they earned.

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