President Joe Biden is taking victory laps for last year’s reduced budget deficit. No one would be happier than me to see this number fall in a significant way. But the decline has nothing to do with the president’s policies, and it changes little about the dangers of our fiscal situation. According to monthly reporting […]
Don’t worry if you get confused reading accounts of the new Social Security Trustees Report. On one hand, you have some articles reporting that this document shows that Social Security will be insolvent in less than 15 years. Others prompt you to pop champagne corks in celebration of Social Security’s financial footing being so strong […]
When is a tax break actually a tax penalty? When it’s the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. That’s what Michael Cannon, Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, convincingly argues in his recent paper, End the Tax Exclusion for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance. His paper is a compact lesson in the ways that some supposed […]
In June 2021, ProPublica published confidential IRS tax information about wealthy Americans provided by a still-unidentified source. While we don’t yet know who dumped the data, we do know that this is far from the first time that the tax agency, which forces people to reveal sensitive details about their finances, has proven to be […]
Rhode Island yesterday became the 19th state to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, signed a bill that immediately allows adults 21 or older to possess up to an ounce of cannabis in public and grow up to three plants at home. State-licensed recreational sales are supposed to start on December […]