Daily Policy Digest
Tax and Spending Issues
| High Taxes Penalize Working Wives For married upper-income women, the new tax law will create a top tax rate of roughly 42 percent plus state and local taxes for a total tax rate of more than 50 percent... |
| Social Security: It's Worse Than You Think The Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out -- to the tune of $800 billion by 2031... |
| Should U.S. Fiscal Policy Address Slow Growth or the Debt? A Nondilemma The United States faces two economic challenges: slow growth and an ever-increasing ratio of debt to gross domestic product... |
| Advantages of Low Capital Gains Tax Rates If policymakers are willing to cut the capital gains tax, the tax base would expand overtime and overall economic activity would be increased... |
| How Corporate Tax Credits Got in the "Cliff" Deal The fiscal cliff legislation included $76 billion in special interest tax credits for several companies... |
| America's Massive Debt Has Come Back to Bite Us The current debt ceiling is at about $16.4 trillion -- about $52,000 per person in the United States... |
| A Winning Plan for Entitlement Reform In President Obama's first year, spending increased to 25 percent of the gross domestic product, after being stabilized at 20 percent since World War II, says Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| The Hated Property Tax: Salience, Tax Rates and Tax Revolts In 1970, property taxes comprised 3.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); by 2000, they comprised only 2.5 percent of GDP... |
| A Bipartisan Nation of Beneficiaries Nearly 55 percent of Americans have received government benefits from a major entitlement program... |
| Trillion-Dollar Deficits Are Sustainable for Now, Unfortunately Even with a trillion-dollar budget deficit, it is unlikely that the United States will experience a debt crisis similar to what other countries like Greece and Spain did... |
