C. Eugene Steuerle's Blog: The Government We Deserve, page 9

An Ideal Presidential Candidate

After weeks of hearing the presidential candidates pander to your interests and mine, asking us to give up nothing or do nothing to create a better nation—after all, the responsibility for our problems always lies with immigrants, or government workers, or the rich, or business executives, or stupid liberals or conservatives, or some other group […]

Reforming Disability Policy: Tough Choices Required

Disability policy has gotten increased attention recently because the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) trust fund is unable to pay our current benefits through 2016. But reform should involve more than money.

Why Health Cost Growth Increases after Estimators Say it’s Slowing: Observer Effects and Feedback Loops

"Health cost growth has slowed down, we think. So let's increase health costs." This is the federal government’s apparent response to some recent sanguine estimates about the future of health cost growth. We might call this response a policy version of the “observer effect,” where the mere observation of reality changes that reality. In this case, the observation that health care costs may be increasing more slowly than expected creates a political reality in which fewer efforts are exerted t...

Combined Tax Rates and Creating a 21st Century Social Welfare Budget

I urged Congress to modernize the nation’s social welfare programs to focus on early childhood, quality teachers, more effective work subsidies, and improved neighborhoods. One way lawmakers can shift their gaze is by considering the effects of combined marginal tax rates that often rise steeply as people increase their income and lose their eligibility for benefits.

How to Pay Zero Taxes on Income of Millions of Dollars

Now, thanks to Roth accounts, a special form of retirement savings, investors and even their children pay close to zero tax on huge sums of income. While this scheme can create significant future government budget shortfalls, my attention here is on how our tax code favors those who understand how to play this Roth-account game.

Empowering the Next President—and the Next Congress

Now is the ideal time to empower both the president and Congress to better perform their assigned functions: the president to execute and Congress to legislate.

Progress for Every Child

The ultimate goal of educational policy must be progress for every child. Not standards. Not attainment of grade level proficiency. Not college readiness. But progress toward developing each young person’s potential to the fullest extent possible every year. Not only is this the right educational goal, but it is the only one that pulls parents, teachers, and administrators together politically in a shared vision of helping every child, disadvantaged and advantaged alike, to grow into smarter...

One Avenue to Bipartisan Tax Reform: Simplification and Improved Tax Administration

There are many ways to restructure the tax code. Elected officials often fail to detect opportunity when they adhere in a path-dependent way to one past model of success, such the 1986 tax reform. An alternative approach where even the acclaimed 1986 effort made at best modest progress would focus on making tax code simpler for taxpayers and improving compliance without adding to IRS costs. This reframing of reform stands a chance of stepping around the partisan wrangling that deters progress...

Assessing “Wrongs,” Mainly on the Young, to Pay for “Rights”

What happens when the claim to some financial right from the government creates some financial “wrong” somewhere else? That is, when the government’s balance sheets don’t balance, and there aren’t enough assets to pay for claims on them, someone must get short-changed.

A Better Alternative to Taxing Those Without Health Insurance

Although the public debate on health insurance coverage centers on a thumbs-up, thumbs-down fight over the Accountable Care Act (ACA, also called Obamacare), our national system needs a lot of smaller fixes. Many items on this long list of fixes make sense under either a Republican alternative to Obamacare (like the one recently but only partially laid out by Representative Paul Ryan) or Democratic amendments to the existing plan. One example: rethinking the tax penalty on people who do not b...