C. Eugene Steuerle's Blog: The Government We Deserve, page 7

The confusing debate over child tax credits and exemptions

Interestingly, both progressives and conservatives oppose extending preferences to children in middle and higher income families. Progressives prefer to “spend” the money on those with less income, and conservatives, especially supply-siders, believe the funds would be better used to reduce marginal tax rates. But they confuse the two purposes of providing benefits to children.

What Trump’s and Buffett’s tax returns say about how the wealthy are taxed

The individual income tax has never taxed the very wealthy much. There are two major reasons: first, paying individual income taxes on capital income is largely discretionary, since investors don’t pay tax on their gains until they sell an asset. Second, taxpayers can easily leverage capital gains and other tax preferences by borrowing, deducting expenses, and taking losses at higher ordinary rates while their income is taxed at lower rates.

Social Security must be fair for everyone, not just retirees

No one should assess Social Security policy in isolation. What is fair in Social Security must relate to what is fair for the national budget as a whole. The current system discourages work in late-middle age, something that is no longer easily affordable and which reduces economic growth, personal income and tax revenues.

STUDENT DEBT: THE MACRO QUESTION

As students accumulated $1.3 trillion in debt, did government make an equivalent increase in investment in what economists often call “human capital”? Or did government simply shift additional burdens onto these students with few or no significant gains in educational achievement nationwide? Or something in between?

Reducing Wealth Inequality Requires Holding Risky Assets

Advocates and lawmakers trying to counter wealth inequality, therefore, must find ways to get low-wealth savers into longer-term assets like stock and real estate, mainly through retirement plans and homeownership. Small business ownership also matters. And, subsidies provided by government must encourage long holding periods—that is, saving over time, not short-term deposits.

Restoring More Discretion to the Federal Budget

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the three largest entitlement programs, accounted for $1.9 trillion, or about half, of federal spending in 2015. Congress can take steps to draw more attention to long-term sustainability when making budget choices. Entitlements should be reviewed more frequently, and periodic votes of Congress should determine most of their growth.

The ‘Save Our Social Security Act of 2016’: A Major Step Toward Reform

Labeled the “Save Our Social Security Act of 2016,” the proposal also recognizes an important fact: that the longer we delay reform, the more it will cost post-babyboom generations. Gen X and Y and Millennials are already scheduled to pay more for their benefits than boomers and older generations no matter what path we take to reform.

The Federal Government on Autopilot: Mandatory Spending and the Entitlement Crisis

Restoring fiscal democracy requires nothing more or less than restoring greater discretion to the budget.

Health costs, not Obamacare, dominate the future of federal spending

From all the political discussion about health care, you’d think that government health policy lives or dies by what happens to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. One side offers almost nothing apart from saying Obamacare must (somehow) be abandoned. The other side tells us that health costs, partly thanks to Obamacare, might be under control. Neither side faces up to the continuing dominance of health costs in projections of future federal spending.

A Universal Basic Income? Right Debate, Wrong Answer

Recently, advocates have revived and extended an old idea: that government should give everyone, regardless of their economic circumstances, a universal basic income (UBI).