Daily Policy Digest
Tax and Spending Issues
| Why the Next Farm Bill Should Be the Last Farms account for a small percentage of rural employment and subsidies tend to go to large corporations, which now dominate the agriculture industry... |
| Comparing the House, Senate and Obama Budget Plans The House budget would return the level of federal taxing and spending to its long-term average by reducing federal spending increases by cutting $5.7 trillion over the next 10 years, says Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Obama Budget Proposals Raises Taxes on Middle Class For the first time in his presidency, Obama is proposing to raise taxes on people below the $250,000 threshold... |
| Revisiting the High Tax Rates of the 1950s While the top tax bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91 percent in the 1950s, less than one-tenth of one percent of Americans paid this rate... |
| Danes Overhaul Generous Welfare State Only 47 percent of Denmark's total population worked in 2012 and many of those who did worked short hours with all the perks, including an unofficial $20 an hour minimum wage... |
| New Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Plan Shows Promise According to projections, the new Bowles-Simpson plan will achieve $5.2 trillion in deficit reduction compared to $4.3 trillion in reductions in the Senate-passed and Obama budgets... |
| Tax Code More Complex Than Ever The current paperwork burden generated by the Internal Revenue Service now totals more than 6.7 billion hours... |
| Obama's Budget Proposal Seeks to Cap Retirement Savings Limiting an individual's retirement savings account balance to $3 million would only save the federal government an estimated $9 billion over 10 years -- barely enough to cover the current deficit for a few days... |
| 2009 Stimulus Was Squandered Nearly half of the new hires that stimulus money generated were employees that were previously employed, meaning that it added far fewer jobs than expected... |
| Postal Service Losing $25 Million Daily with "Broken Business Model" Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe told Congress recently that the U.S. Postal Service could become "a significant burden to the taxpayer"... |
