High marginal tax rates can make moving above poverty very difficult for low-income families. These high tax rates result from increasing direct taxes (both state and federal) as well as decreasing transfer payments (including both Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and Temporary...

Provides a historical analysis of many aspects of this tax over the postwar era: revenues collected, the size of the tax base and the role of the exclusions, deductions, exemptions and credits in defining that base, tax exempt levels of income, and the overall progressivity of the rate structure.

Budget rules are both necessary and arbitrary, apply one time or over time, and are frequently associated with some numerical target. The Budget Enforcement Act (BEA) rules of 1990 worked primarily because they enforced an agreement already made, backing up a broad political consensus with much...

Even after passage of the 2001 legislation, federal taxes as a share of gross domestic product will fall well within the narrow range that has prevailed since the end of World War II. The bill brought to light the danger of bifurcating the tax and expenditure sides of the budget, and conflicts...

Summarizes the problems that are associated with most of the existing proposals for health care reform. Suggests ways to avoid the problems while stating that both liberals and conservatives can unite to deal with health care problems without abandoning their principles and concerns that limit...

Argues that basic public finance principles should be more rigorously applied in educational policy design. Such an application would more consistently measure the value of all subsidies -- and consider where education spending would most likely produce the highest social rate of return.

Encouraging work at older ages is a crucial policy goal for an aging society, but many features of the benefits and tax system discourage work. This study computes the implicit tax rate on work at older ages, broadly defined to include standard income and payroll taxes as well as changes in...