C. Eugene Steuerle

The Congressional Budget Office and government actuaries for decades have shown that Social Security and Medicare remain on unsustainable tracks, but it is often hard...

The Congressional Budget Office and government actuaries for decades have shown that Social Security and Medicare remain on unsustainable tracks, but it is often hard...

You may have never heard the name Stanley Surrey, but anytime you read about the efficacy of tax policy, the analysis likely reflects his legacy...

The dependent exemption, the earned income tax credit (EITC), and the child tax credit (CTC), supported at times by Republicans and Democrats alike, help bolster...

If the Court determines that “realization” is a Constitutional requirement, the decision would, at worst, threaten to gut the taxation of capital income. At best, it would require the Court to join Congress and the US Treasury Department in the endless game of whack-a-mole on tax shelters.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (full disclosure: I am on its board) and the American Hospital Association recently debated whether nonprofit hospitals provided...

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (full disclosure: I am on its board) and the American Hospital Association recently debated whether nonprofit hospitals provided...

President Bill Clinton famously declared in his 1996 State of the Union address, “ The era of big government is over .” He didn’t get...

Our government has long given away money and refused to collect the funds necessary to pay for those giveaways. While budget reformers often define their goal as reducing the resulting deficits, that’s not enough. 

The U.S. recently surpassed the unfortunate milestone where all new federal revenue is already committed to specific spending priorities due to existing laws. As discussed in my recent book, Beyond Zombie Rule: Reclaiming Fiscal Sanity in a Broken Congress, this obstruction of current and future voters’ ability to make decisions has been growing under all recent presidents. That growth shows no sign of abating under President Trump. Unless Congress enacts major reform, this extraordinary constraint will block any significant effort by President Trump and a Republican Congress—or any future Democratic majority—to alter the long-term course cemented by those past legislators. Like zombies, past legislation rises up and drags revenues away from funding today’s and tomorrow’s priorities. To show how the nation’s tax and spending laws have combined to restrict the choices of succeeding generations, Tim Roeper, now with the Department of Economics at New York University, and I developed a fiscal democ