Daily Policy Digest
Tax and Spending Issues
| Writing Checks against the Future On January 9, the federal government's debt officially surpassed $15 trillion -- an amount larger than the total annual output of the U.S. economy... |
| Federal Employees Owe $1.03 Billion in Unpaid Taxes About 98,000 federal, postal and congressional employees owed $1.03 billion in unpaid taxes at the end of fiscal 2010... |
| States Created Their Public Pension Problems, and States Should Solve Them A 2010 academic study estimates that 116 major state-sponsored pension plans have assets of about $1.8 trillion to pay pension promises of between $3.6 trillion and $5.2 trillion... |
| Most Foreign Postal Services Are Profitable Of the 30 reporting nations, only the United States' and Macao's postal services saw losses in all four years examined... |
| How Good Are the Government's Deficit and Debt Projections and Should We Care? The Congressional Budget Office predicted in 2001 that the publicly held debt of the federal government (then about $3.5 trillion) would be eliminated by 2010, but it actually increased to $9 trillion... |
| Public Pension "Air Time" Is an Absurdly Generous Perk State governments should revisit their investment assumptions and bring pension benefits in line with private-sector rates... |
| Nearly Half of U.S. Households Receive Government Benefits Some 48.6 percent of the population lived in a household receiving some type of government benefit in the second quarter of 2010, up a notch from 48.5 percent in the first quarter... |
| Congress' Pension Math Doesn't Add Up Today, only about 20 percent of private workers are covered by defined benefit plans... |
| Government Pay Is Inflated Reducing federal pay to market rates would save taxpayers approximately $47 billion per year... |
| States Vary Widely in Number of Taxpayers Deducting State or Local Sales Taxes The option to deduct sales tax, rather than income tax, is a temporary provision that must be extended each year... |
