C. Eugene Steuerle's Blog: The Government We Deserve, page 10

Addressing income inequality first requires knowing what we’re measuring

Politicians, researchers, and the media have given a good deal of attention recently to widening income inequality. Yet very few have paid attention to how—and how well—we measure income. Different measures of income show very different results on whether and how much inequality has risen. Without clarity, even honest and non-ideological public and private efforts to address inequality will fall short of their mark—and, in some cases, exacerbate inequality further.

The President’s Capital Gains Proposals: An Opening for Business Tax Reform?

In his budget proposal, President Obama would raise capital gains taxes as a way to finance middle class tax relief. Along with many Republicans, he also supports tax rate cuts for business and efforts to prevent multinational corporations from avoiding U. S. taxation. This raises an intriguing possibility. Why not pay for at least some corporate tax cuts with higher taxes on individuals on their receipts of capital gains or similar returns? In effect, as it becomes increasingly difficult to...

President Obama’s Middle-Class Tax Message in the State of the Union

President Obama’s tax proposals for the middle class were a key element of his State of the Union address. But they represent only relatively modest efforts to create subsidies through the tax code rather than through other departments of government. Looked at broadly, many only tinker around the edges of tax policy and count on an overloaded and troubled agency, the IRS, to administer them.

America’s Can-Do New Year’s Resolution

How about a national new year’s resolution for 2015? Here’s my suggestion: let’s resolve to restore our can-do spirit, sense of destiny, and vision of frontiers as challenges rather than barriers.

An April 15 Deadline for Charitable Giving Would Be a Boon to Nonprofits

Many years ago, I began to suggest that taxpayers should have the opportunity to give to charity all the way until April 15 and then take a deduction against their previous year’s taxable income. Now the idea is getting attention from lawmakers—but it needs the support of charities to make possible the increase in charitable giving it would foster.

Pushing on Air in a Balloon: Health Cost Growth and $1,000 Pills

Numerous recent articles have tried to address whether health cost growth is slowing more permanently. Though I have entered that debate at times , I must admit that it’s a complex question for which there is no definite answer. Policymakers and private practitioners have improved some of the ways that health care is priced and delivered, and more improvements are no doubt forthcoming. But the stories of Gilead and its $1,000-a-pill Hepatitis C drug make one point entirely clear: improving he...

Is it Time to Make Kids a Higher Budget Priority?

When it comes to how we spend our money, we seldom dwell on what we’re not buying. But money spent in one place cannot be spent in another. With the release of Kids’ Share 2014, the eighth in an annual series, my fellow Urban Institute researchers and I assess what share of the federal budget goes for kids and what shares go to other priorities. The word “share” is chosen deliberately: it forces us to recognize that a larger piece of the pie for someone must mean a smaller piece for someone e...

If I Care About Economic Mobility, Should I Vote for MIT or… MIT?

I’m pleased that politicians from both sides of the aisle are focusing on economic mobility. In life, the deck gets stacked fairly early and connections play a big role. In an open and democratic society like the United States, it’s not so much that a person can’t get a hit; it’s that one person steps up to the plate with three balls and no strikes, and the next with no balls and two strikes. The odds that the second person ends up with a higher batting average than the first after 10 times a...

Jim Brady and a BOGGSAT

The lesson from Brady I never forgot was BOGSAT—“Bunch of guys sitting around a table.” Brady was the first from whom I heard this quip, though I cannot track down the occasion(s). BOGGSAT (I’ve removed the sexual bias in the acronym by adding an additional “G” for “gals.”) is the best description I know for how most policy, at the end of the day, is decided. Often I write about Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, adhering to some position that I believe violates some core pr...

Why Delayed Social Security Reform Costs Us

Looking to Social Security, after three quarters of a century of continual growth, it has largely succeeded in providing basic protections to most, though not all, older people. Now, as psychologist Laura Carstensen at the Stanford Center on Longevity suggests, we should be redesigning our institutions around the new possibilities that improved healthcare, reduced physical demands, and long lives provide. But the eternal automatic growth of Social Security is not conditioned on any assessment...