Publications

Virtually all forecasters project federal budget surpluses as far as the eye can see. How to use these surpluses most effectively?

1998 was supposed to be the year when fiscal good times finally overflowed the U.S. Treasury and put money back into the pockets of ordinary Americans in the form of tax cuts. What happened?

Articles include "Congress' UpHill Challenge," "RIP: The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1998," "Paygo: A Rule Made to Be Broken," "Divorcing the Marriage Penalty," and "Despite Balanced Budget, Signs of Trouble." Facts on the Growth of Government: The Coming Social Security Crisis.

1999's installment of IPI's annual review of ten of the worst regulations of the federal government. 2-page treatments of ten harmful regulations, with suggestions for reform. Regulations include Labor Dept. Pension Rules, Attempted Environmental Crimes, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Bilingual Education, EPA Sludge Rules, the federal sugar program, the FCC's Universal Service Program, Foreign Sales Corporations and military producers, CA's Proposition 65, and the "Tulloch Rule" interpretation of the Clean Water Act.

This issue brief looks at the major proposals and the bill’s economic and revenue effects.

In 1997, Congress forfeited a golden opportunity to begin returning large budget surpluses to the taxpayers in the form of tax cuts. Part of the failing was political will, but faulty budget projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) were a major part of the failure. In this policy report, economist Larry Hunter explains the forecasting errors of CBO and the political failures of the Republican-controlled Congress, and warns that the budget surplus is a "self-negating proposition," in that Congress will spend the money before it accumulates. The only way to prevent government from simply spending the money is to cut taxes first. Hunter repeats Jack Kemp's call for large, Reaganesque tax cuts before it is too late.

This paper summarizes the three major arguments against continued U.S. involvement in the IMF.

"We'd love to cut your taxes, but it's against the rules" say politicians. The rules they are talking about is a budgetary regime referred to as "Paygo," or "pay-as-you-go." Passed as a deficit control measure, the Paygo rules were intended to prevent Congress from cutting taxes unless they cut spending by an equivalent amount. It sounds prudent, but as practiced, Paygo is an albatross around the neck of those who want to reduce a historically-high tax burden in the face of enormous mounting budget surpluses.

The purpose of this issue brief is to focus on how changing the tax treatment of married couples would affect the economy. As background, the first section explains how the tax code and marital status interact. The next section estimates the economic and revenue consequences of four proposals
while the last section discusses whether reducing marriage penalties makes for good tax policy.

 Recently released figures lead us to estimate that the federal budget surplus could be roughly $1 trillion higher than Congress expected when it drafted the bi-partisan budget deal at this time last year. We believe that at least half of this $1 trillion windfall (but preferably all of it) should be returned to taxpayers via a very large tax cut enacted immediately.