Daily Policy Digest
Tax and Spending Issues
| The Impact of Romney's Proposed $17,000 Deduction Cap While Romney's deduction cap does succeed in paying for his tax plan without raising taxes on the middle class, it does so by reducing overall growth and lowering the tax cut for upper income payers... |
| Tax Gimmicks Politicians use four types of gimmicks to hide tax increases from the voting public... |
| Job Benefits Growing Faster than Wages Employer-paid benefits accounted for 19.7 percent of worker compensation last year compared to 16.6 percent in 2000... |
| Welfare Spending Shattering All-Time Highs If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the United States... |
| Waste Book 2012 NASA spends $1 million a year researching food for astronauts to eat on Mars even though there are no plans for a manned mission to Mars... |
| A Simple Measure of the Distributional Burden of Debt Accumulation The distributional burden of payments on the debt under current law is about $1,366 per year for households with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000... |
| Social Security's War on Working Wives In the status quo, one-earner couples get a higher rate of return on their Social Security contributions... |
| CBO Updates TARP Tally: $24 Billion Cost to Taxpayers The latest update from the Congressional Budget Office projects the Troubled Asset Relief Program will ultimately wrap up at a cost of $24 billion... |
| The End of Social Security's Self-Financing The payroll tax holiday marks the first time that lawmakers have pivoted from the self-financing structure of Social Security... |
| Corporate Taxes, the Myths and Facts The U.S. corporate tax rate stands a full 14 percentage points above the average rate among major advanced economies... |
