Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain wants to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer travel season. Truckers say they like the idea. In this Marketplace commentary, Len Burman, Director of the Tax Policy Center explains why Senator McCains proposal wont get us where...

What if President William Howard Taft and his Congress had written laws that specified how all the governments revenues at the beginning of the 21st century were to be spent? Preposterous? Well, the laws on the books today not only dictate how all revenues collected in 2030 and beyond will be...

President Bush's new health care proposal ignores the most important problems in the current health care system: a lack of guaranteed affordable, accessible, and adequate insurance coverage for those with modest incomes or with high health needs. The proposal's focus on limiting the tax...

Hal Salzman and Leonard Lynn argue that recent reports warning of a rising threat posed by hordes of scientists and engineers graduating from Chinese and Indian universities are wrong on several counts, countering that rather than technonationalism, the United States should invest in education,...

[Investor's Business Daily] In this article, Senior Fellows Rudolph Penner and Eugene Steuerle diagnose the hidden calamity confronting the federal budget and offer a mix of simple, powerful mechanisms to "make the budget ever more responsible instead of ever less." Currently, Social...

In "100 Million Unnecessary Returns," Michael Graetz, professor of law at Columbia University, proposed sweeping tax reform that would remove most current taxpayers from the income tax rolls, reform the corporate income tax, significantly reduce the top individual and corporate rates, and adopt...

Private equity funds manage vast amounts of money: $2.5 trillion in 2010, much more than the $100 billion in 1994. They earn immense profits, largely from selling the stock of acquired and improved companies. This article focuses on the character of the funds' profits. It recommends that the IRS...

A candidate for office effectively divides the population into the "deserving," who should get more benefits or tax cuts (or at least should not pay more taxes or lose benefits), and the "undeserving," who are not carrying their own weight. But he or she doesn't want to put very many people in...

This brief attempts to access the trends in charitable giving and how the current economic turmoil has affected the nonprofit sector - the main topic of an August 2011 roundtable hosted by the Tax Policy and Charities project at the Urban Institute. Twenty-five experts on tax policy and the...

Kids' Share 2012: Report on Federal Expenditures on Children through 2011, a sixth annual report, looks comprehensively at trends in federal spending and tax expenditures on children. This appendix details our data sources, the programs we include, and the methodology used to estimate...