If you really want to know what a particular government agency is doing, how it spends its money, how many employees it has or what it has accomplished in the past or seeks to accomplish in the future, you must read the appendix to the federal budget. That information doesn’t exist anywhere else.
The president’s budget used to be a big ...

Congress is currently addressing two major proposals to help the working poor: an increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25 an hour, where it has been set since July 24, 2009, and an increase in the earned income tax credit, proposed by the White House, that sends cash payments to those with low earnings. Supporters of ...

“Tax reform” is like moms and apple pie – everyone is for it. That is because it means all things to all people – simplicity, fairness, faster growth, lower unemployment and tax cuts for almost everyone. Legislators love tax reform, too, because it provides so many opportunities for private meetings with tax lobbyists to discuss their concerns, ...

In last week’s post, I made reference to some 210-year-old budget data that required a contextual adjustment. Calling a $50,000 expenditure in 1803 a large number wouldn’t have registered with readers and made my point unless it could be adjusted in some way to make it comparable to an equivalently large expenditure today.This led to ...

Executive orders have been controversial since the founding of the republic. They have long given rise to complaints from members of Congress that they infringe on its legislative power. But at the same time, it is obvious that legislative language cannot contemplate all of the means by which the laws are to be enforced; some executive latitude ...

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, an economic milestone will be reached when the National Bureau of Economic Research publishes its 20,000th working paper. Such papers have become ubiquitous among economists and economic journalists. They not only set the tone for much commentary, in both academic journals and the popular news media, but ...

In posts on Jan. 22, 2013, and Sept. 24, 2013, I discussed how President John F. Kennedy came to support a big tax cut and his struggle to get it passed in the House of Representatives against strong conservative resistance, because of concerns about the deficit. After his assassination, it was left to Lyndon B. Johnson to achieve final action ...

Last week I discussed the roots of tax reform dating back to the 1960s. Until the late 1970s, it was a movement driven largely by liberals trying to close tax loopholes and make the rich pay their fair share. By the early 1980s, conservatives had joined the debate.
In my earlier post, I said that inflation was the most important factor ...

Thirty years ago this week, Ronald Reagan set in motion the process that eventually led to passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Since many people believe that a similar tax reform is long overdue, it’s important to understand why the Reagan effort worked and why similar conditions do not yet exist today.
In his State of the Union Address on ...

The taxation of capital gains has always been among the most politically contentious elements of the tax code and will be among the most difficult to resolve when fundamental tax reform is undertaken. But it is made even more difficult by an old Supreme Court case limiting the scope of potential reform.
The first federal income tax was ...

Last week, I discussed the case for increasing the size of the California State Legislature and perhaps others as well. But the case for increasing the size of the House of Representatives is even stronger. The size of the House was one of the most hotly debated issues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The ...

On Dec. 27, The Wall Street Journal reported that businessman John H. Cox has a ballot initiative in the state of California cleared for circulation (No. 1615) that would increase the size of the state legislature about a hundredfold. The idea is to shrink the size of each legislative district so that a smaller number of people will ...

On Dec. 20, the Brookings Institution economist Justin Wolfers sent out this provocative post on Twitter: “The decline in the budget deficit since 2009 is the largest four-year improvement since the demobilization from WWII.”
I was aware that the deficit was declining sharply, both in nominal terms and as a share of the gross domestic product, ...

In the last two weeks, the Internal Revenue Service, Congressional Budget Office and Census Bureau have released new data illuminating the distribution of federal taxes and spending. They show that the tax and transfer system is a powerful force for the equalization of incomes.
The I.R.S. data are for shares of federal income taxes and income ...

In October, Swiss voters submitted sufficient signatures to put an initiative on the ballot that would pay every citizen of Switzerland $2,800 per month, no strings attached. Similar efforts are under way throughout Europe. And there is growing talk of establishing a basic income for Americans as well. Interestingly, support comes mainly ...

hLast week, Ron Unz, a California businessman, submitted a ballot initiative to the California secretary of state that would raise the state minimum wage to $12 an hour in 2016 from the current $8. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.
Many states have minimum wages above the federal rate. Democrats and progressives have been pushing for ...

Although the prospects for tax reform in Congress have dimmed of late, the lobbying activity has not. The corporate community continues to put pressure on Congress to reduce the statutory corporate tax rate, which, at 39.1 percent including state and local taxes, is the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation ...

Ten years ago this week, Republicans enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state since the creation of Medicare in 1965 by adding a huge unfunded program providing coverage for prescription drugs to the Medicare program.
For years, responsible critics had said it was a system flaw that Medicare did not pay for prescription drugs along ...

Last week, two new reports deepened our knowledge of poverty and efforts by the federal government to alleviate it.The first is by the Census Bureau, which annually calculates the poverty rate based on a formula devised in the 1960s that has been updated only for inflation since then. The latest official data were released on Sept. 17 and put ...

One of the least well-known aspects of tax policy-making is the distribution table, which is produced by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a Congressional committee, for every major tax bill. The tables show how the legislation affects taxpayers at different income levels. It is a generally understood, if unstated, rule that tax cuts should ...

In a previous post, I noted that this year was the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax, which came into permanent existence in 1913. This year is also the 70th anniversary of the institution of tax withholding.
Before 1943, all taxpayers paid their income taxes in a lump sum no later than March 15 the following year, although ...

This week, according to the Treasury Department, it will exhaust its “extraordinary” measures to avoid hitting a hard debt ceiling. It is not known precisely the date at which it will lack the cash to pay interest on the national debt, but on the day that happens, the United States will be in default.
The Obama administration and those on ...

In military terms, the government shutdown is conventional warfare and refusing to raise the debt limit is nuclear war. In short, it is an order of magnitude more serious, more dangerous. Yet Congressional Republicans have made clear their intention to go nuclear unless President Obama accedes to their budgetary demands. On Sunday, the ...

Thursday, Oct. 3, is the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax. That is the day that President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation into law in 1913, concluding a process begun four years earlier by President William Howard Taft.

There had been an income tax during the Civil War that Congress allowed to expire in 1872. Republicans, who controlled Congress and the White House throughout much of the second half of the 19th century, preferred to raise the federal government’s revenue through tariffs ...

On Sept. 25, 1963, the tax cut proposed by President John F. Kennedy took its first major step toward enactment when the House of Representatives voted in favor of it. Its comfortable victory, however, does not mean the tax cut was a slam dunk. On the contrary, it was an uphill struggle that required considerable work by the White House to ...

In a recent post, I discussed the nontaxation of imputed rent – the income homeowners receive from themselves by virtue of being both landlord and renter – which, judging by the comments, many readers found bizarre. In my continuing series on tax expenditures, this week I want to discuss another form of income that few people recognize as ...

Continuing my series on tax expenditures, this week I want to discuss accelerated depreciation for business investments in machinery and equipment, the eighth-largest tax expenditure, which will reduce federal revenues by $274 billion over the next five years, according to the Treasury Department. There is an additional tax expenditure of ...

Continuing my series on tax expenditures, I want to discuss an obscure one: the imputed rent that homeowners get from living in their own homes.

At first glance, the idea that this constitutes any form of income probably strikes most people as bizarre. But a little thought shows that there are many forms of income that don’t take the form of monetary payments. I discussed one previously, the exclusion for ...

Last week, I discussed certain aspects of the federal tax deduction for charitable contributions. I return to this topic to review a few more points.

One issue is to what extent the charitable deduction actually motivates net additional contributions. As I noted previously, a large amount of aggregate contributions is made by people who cannot deduct them because their income is too low to have an income tax liability or ...

The deduction for charitable contributions is among the oldest and most popular in the tax code. According to the Treasury, it reduces federal revenues by $54 billion, making it the fifth-largest tax expenditure. Whether or not it is curtailed to raise revenue for tax-rate reductions, there are growing concerns about the deduction and also ...

The federal deduction for state and local taxes, in the tax world often called the Salt deduction, is among the largest in the tax code, reducing federal revenues $77 billion this year: $25 billion for property taxes on owner-occupied homes and $52 billion for state income and other taxes. Conservatives have long had special enmity for ...

When people talk about “sacred cows” in the tax code, the deduction for mortgage interest is usually at the top of the list. But it is just one of many tax expenditures benefiting homeowners. Other important ones include the deduction for property taxes and low taxes on the gains from sales of ...

The Senate Finance Committee recently committed itself to a zero-based approach to tax reform. All tax expenditures – special provisions that reduce taxes – will be deemed expendable unless senators speak up in support of them.

I am dubious about the value of this approach but nevertheless think it is useful to re-examine the origins and operation of major tax expenditures, many of which were adopted on the fly, with little thought to their long-run implications. Today I want to begin a series of ...