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Pre-2005 Content Archive

Report

SCHIP Financing Update

June 5, 2006 | and
The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), jointly financed by states and the federal government, provides comprehensive health insurance coverage to more than four million low-income...
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Report

A "Mere" $300 Billion: Should a $300 Billion Deficit Be Considered a Victory?

June 5, 2006 | and

Key Findings

  • Some of the revenue increase appears to have been caused by growing income inequality rather than general economic improvement.
  • The current deficit — and the resulting increase in debt — are substantially worse than the historical norm, especially for a period of economic recovery.
  • Running a $300 billion deficit burdens future taxpayers; it causes the debt to grow faster than the economy, which is not sustainable on an ongoing basis.
  • At this stage in the business cycle — 4½ years after the bottom of the 2001 recession — the deficit should be much lower than $300 billion. Lower deficits are necessary to increase national saving — which is at historic lows — in order to better prepare the nation for the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation.
  • As Goldman Sachs has said, the current surge in revenues likely is due in part to temporary factors, and the rate of revenue growth is expected to slow in coming years.
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Report

The House-Passed Budget Plan

May 22, 2006 | , , and

Key Findings

  • The plan would cut 2007 funding for domestic discretionary programs $12 billion below the Senate-passed level.
  • The plan would allow much larger tax cuts in 2007 through 2010 than are currently allowed.
  • Despite its proposals to reduce domestic programs, the plan would increase the deficit by $254 billion over five years, because of the effect of its tax cuts and defense spending increases.
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Report

Social Security and Inheritance

May 3, 2006 | and David Kamin

Key Findings

  • Social Security already contains a major inheritance provision in the form of survivors benefits, which can provide the equivalent of a $400,000 inheritance to a family with two young children if the breadwinner dies.
  • Many private accounts plans include reductions in survivors benefits that would substantially exceed the amount that could be inherited through a private account. As a result, many surviving family members would receive smaller inheritances than under the current Social Security system.
  • In addition, under the leading private-accounts plans, if a worker died before retiring, the spouse would inherit not only the deceased worker’s account but also the debt that the worker owed to Social Security (for having elected to have funds diverted from Social Security to the account). For many spouses, the debt would exceed the size of the private account, leaving them with a negative inheritance.
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Report

President's 2007 Budget Renews Same Number of Housing Vouchers Funded in 2006

April 25, 2006 | and

Key Findings

  • The President’s 2007 budget request would renew approximately 2.07 million vouchers, about the same number funded in 2006.
  • The budget would use a flawed formula to distribute voucher funding that would have widely disparate effects on agencies. Because they would receive an inadequate share of funding, one-quarter of all agencies would be able to use less than 90 percent of their authorized vouchers.
  • The budget proposes a major shift in policy that would reduce the voucher assistance available to communities where public or project-based housing has been demolished or otherwise lost.
  • The budget request sets aside up to $100 million in voucher funding for the important purpose of protecting the right of voucher holders to move to communities that better meet their needs (as well as other purposes). These funds also may be needed to meet hurricane-related voucher costs.
  • Since early 2004, voucher assistance for more than 100,000 families has been lost.
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Report

A Taxpayer Bill of Rights by Any Other Name

April 21, 2006 | and

Key Findings

  • The “Stop OverSpending” or SOS spending limit proposed in Montana includes all three central elements of Colorado’s TABOR.
  • In Colorado, TABOR led to reductions in health, education, public safety, and transportation services. Voters suspended TABOR for five years in November 2005.
  • SOS would have similar consequences for public services in Montana as TABOR did in Colorado.
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Report

Proposed Line-Item Veto Legislation Would Invite Abuse by Executive Branch

April 21, 2006 |

Key Findings

  • The line-item veto legislation would expand Presidential power to a greater degree than has been understood.
  • If the President proposed to cancel funds appropriated for a program, Congress would have to vote on his proposal within 10 days from the bill’s introduction in Congress. But even if Congress turned down his request, he could continue withholding the funds until 180 days had passed.
  • If the fiscal year ended before the 180-day period did, the funds could expire. This could enable the President to kill some types of programs even if Congress had rejected his proposals to cancel funding for the programs.
  • The Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, columnist George Will, and other analysts have concluded the legislation is as likely to increase expenditures as to reduce them, because a President could use this new authority to pressure Members of Congress to support some of his spending and tax-cut priorities in return for a promise not to propose canceling appropriation items they favored.
  • The legislation supposedly applies to both increases in entitlements and new “targeted tax benefits.” In fact, its application to special-interest tax breaks may be more apparent then real, as Congress would be able to draft new tax breaks in ways that exempted them from the line-item veto procedure.
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Report

Changing The Budget Rules

April 18, 2006 |
SummaryIn the budget it presented to Congress last month, the Bush Administration proposed a series of changes in the rules under which Congress considers and approves the federal budget.[1]  The...
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Report

Tax Reform and Poverty

April 10, 2006 |
The tax system has a pervasive impact on poverty, both directly through its role in the distribution of society’s resources and indirectly through its effects on the incentives for economic...
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Report

Closing the Tax Gap

April 10, 2006 |
The Internal Revenue Service recently released updated estimates showing that the tax gap – which it describes as “the difference between what taxpayers should have paid and what they actually...
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Report

Poor Measurement: New Census Report on Measuring Poverty Raises Concerns

March 28, 2006 |

Key Findings

  • The Census Bureau recently unveiled new alternative poverty measures “intended to provide a more complete measure of economic well-being.”  The new poverty measures, which produce poverty rates as much as one-third below the official poverty rate, contain some features that have been characterized by poverty experts and past Census reports as flawed or incomplete.
  • Unlike past Census reports on alternative measures of poverty, this report does not include a set of poverty measures that follow the recommendations of an expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and that are more complete than either the official poverty rate or the new measures.  Poverty rates under the NAS measures are generally higher than the official poverty rate.
  • The new measures are flawed (and biased downward) because, among other reasons, they do not account for families’ expenses for child care and medical care and attribute major new categories of income (such as potential income from home equity) to families without making the adjustments to the poverty threshold necessary to create a consistent measure of well-being.
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