Imagine you're in a coffee shop when a man you don't know sits down uninvited next to you. Scribbling on a napkin and spouting something about "tax cuts pay for themselves," the man then confidently proclaims: "You really can't collect much money from upper-income people. They know how to get around taxes." You'd probably roll […]

So another tax season has come and gone. In this case, that means Americans can render their verdict on the first year of the signature legislative achievement of Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Thus far, the reviews are not kind. Despite an analysis by […]

Zombies have gripped American popular culture for years. In books, television shows, and films, the undead are regularly resurrected for your entertainment. (Even Jane Austen fans were treated to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy butchering those from beyond the grave in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.) But whatever their reanimation story, the zombie's Achilles' heel […]

When House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts demanded the Internal Revenue Service turn over six years of Donald Trump's tax returns to his committee, he was doing so with the law fully on his side. As past Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, former Joint Committee on Taxation chief of staff Edward Kleinbard, […]

As 2018 draws to a close, there is growing concern about what the next year will bring for the American economy. President Trump's twin self-inflicted wounds of an ongoing trade war with China and a needless government shutdown helped send stock markets into a December panic. The expanding global economy, too, shows signs of a […]

In the future, historians and political scientists will speak of the "Ryan Gap." That moniker will be used to measure the yawning chasm between the shining image a politician manufactures for him or herself and the brutal truth of their failed ideas and meager accomplishments. Of course, the inspiration for that damning delta between perception […]

And now for today's thought exercise. Imagine you are a member of Congress. Recent assessments from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warn that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2018, which ended on Sept. 30, jumped to $779 billion and annual trillion-dollar shortfalls will return beginning in FY 2020. But then you learn of […]

A new Gallup poll last week once again confirmed that Americans are decidedly unimpressed by the GOP's "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" passed in December. Coming just weeks after a Fox News survey found Obamacare enjoyed greater popularity than the Republican tax cuts, Gallup's latest tally revealed that respondents continue to disapprove of President Trump's […]

Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving a swath of destruction in […]

During the run-up to the passage of the "Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" late last year, one technical paper from the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Analysis suddenly went missing. Why "Distributing the Corporate Income Tax: Revised U.S. Treasury Methodology" alone among the office's four-decade online archive of reports and analyses disappeared in September […]