Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories. Our synthetic cohort-level models find...

The United States is on the brink of a paradigmatic change, forced in part by extraordinary budget pressures. Its current budget increasingly de-emphasizes children, investment, and mobility, yet within inevitable budget reform lies a real possibility of a renewed focus on opportunity, of which...

Pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth—theologians tell us that we become better people by examining these sources of failure. But my concern here is not with the classic seven deadly sins, but what I feel are the contemporary seven deadly sins being committed in current policy...

As interest in proposals to restore Social Security solvency rises, it’s timely to examine whether current policy analyses provide adequate information on important distributional questions. This project explores measures of changes in Social Security benefits’ adequacy, horizontal equity,...

Encouraging work at older ages is a critical policy goal for an aging society, but many features of the current system of benefits and taxes provide strong work disincentives. The implicit tax rate on work increases rapidly at older ages, approaching 50 percent for some workers by age 70. In...

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.