TPC Citations & Sources

2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002

TPC research and analysis appears in hundreds of news articles each year. Below is a partial list, including the sources used in selected articles. Please note, article links cited below were verified on the day of publication and may change. 

January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

December

• Coakley outlines plan for tax relief, The Boston Globe, (December 30, 2009) By John Ellement.

  "Brown’s campaign cited research from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center showing that nearly three-fourths of families, not just the wealthy, are getting a tax cut this year from the two tax bills signed into law by George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002. His campaign also posted online a mock restaurant tab contending that some of the policies Coakley supports will cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion by 2014."

• Big Budget Deficits Demand Number Crunching, and More, The Wall Street Journal, (December 29, 2009) By John D. McKinnon.

  "Too often, commissions are a way to pretend you are doing something or create the appearance of something being done when in fact it isn't," said Robert Reischauer, president of the nonpartisan Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "The process can't force the Congress to do that which it doesn't want to do or regards as political suicide."

• The EPA Tackles Greenhouse Gas, Forbes.com, (December 29, 2009) By Ted Gayer.

  "The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare," and are thus subject to inflexible command-and-control regulations under existing law. The move could pressure Congress to pass a new law containing a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases. The EPA should have no illusions about the economic costs that will result from reducing greenhouse gases with these regulations."

• Out with the Aughts: 'T' is for taxes, National Post, (December 26, 2009) By Paul Vieira.

  "Other tax experts say the VAT's introduction could help fix myriad flaws in the present U.S. tax regime. Leonard Burman, director of the Washington-based Tax Policy Centre and public finance expert with the Urban Institute, said that a large fraction of households -- up to 40% -- do not pay income tax because they don't generate enough in wages or use credits to offset earned income."

• What We’re Reading, The New York Times, (December 24, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "The 10 Worst Tax Ideas of 2009, according to Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. Note: Puppy-related tax breaks are rarely going to win you wonk points."

• Change Nobody Believes In, The Wall Street Journal, (December 21, 2009).

  "As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation—whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits—very differently. Under the Senate bill, someone who earned $42,000 would get $5,749 from the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage but $12,750 in the exchange. A worker making $60,000 would get $8,310 in the exchanges but only $3,758 in the current system."

• Letter: Bring back the inheritance tax; it's fair and it bolsters the economy, The Plain Dealer (December 22, 2009).

  "The current inheritance tax reductions will sunset at the end of this year. Many Republicans would like the reductions to be made permanent, but responsible legislators want the income to the Treasury to resume, to help balance the budget. There is no evidence that the tax stifles economic growth or prevents jobs, because only the very wealthy pay the tax, not small business owners or farmers. The Tax Policy Center reported that during recent years only 23 of each 1,000 estates paid tax."

• Why the federal deficit will raise taxes, The New York Times, Economix blog (December 18, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "Taxes would rise to levels that would make a Scandinavian revolt. And the government would not be able to provide anything but the most basic public services. We would no longer be a great power (or even a mediocre one), and the social safety net would evaporate," tax policy expert and Syracuse University professor Len Burman wrote in a recent op-ed cheerfully titled "Catastrophic Budget Failure."

• U.S. estate tax repeal seen bringing chaos, Reuters (December 18, 2009) By Kim Dixon.

  "The estates of about a quarter of 1 percent of Americans would be subject to the estate tax under an earlier bill introduced by Democrats to extend it permanently, according to the Brookings Institution-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center."

• It’s in the Will, Bangor (Maine) Daily News (December 14, 2009).

  "Taxes have become the equivalent of political leprosy. But this comes at a cost. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that permanent repeal would cost the federal government $1.3 trillion over 10 years. The Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center asserts that at the current threshold, “more than 99.7 percent of estates owe no estate tax at all.” Put another way, the estates of between two and three of every 1,000 people who die will pay any estate tax."

• House Votes to Extend Tax Breaks—For Now, The Wall Street Journal (December 9, 2009) By Martin Vaughan.

  "Eric Toder, a fellow at the nonprofit, left-leaning Tax Policy Center, said the Joint Tax Committee report will add needed information to the usual process of extending temporary tax provisions, and could provide a basis for lawmakers to propose dropping some tax breaks. "These things are always left to the end of the year," he said. "It's at the last minute, and nobody wants to have to deal with the effect of all these things terminating, so they just extend them."

• Obama’s Job Proposals, The New York Times, Economix blog (December 8, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "The Tax Policy Center last winter analyzed some of the stimulus bill’s tax provisions — a couple of which Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he wanted to extend, including enhanced expensing provisions for small businesses — and gave them a grade of "C"."

• Obama proposes tax incentive to hire workers, Associated Press (December 8, 2009) By Stephen Ohlemacher.

  "You're trying to subsidize people for doing things they wouldn't otherwise do, but we don't know what they would otherwise do," said Eugene Steuerle, a Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank."

• Obama pushes plans for more job creation, Reuters (December 8, 2009) By Alister Bull and Patricia Zengerle.

  "He was trying to thread the needle between short-term stimulus and long-term fiscal responsibility, or deficit reduction," said Ted Gayer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where Obama spoke."

• Fisking Cap and Trade, The Atlantic (December 8, 2009).

  "Greg Mankiw offers this testimony from Brookings' Ted Gayer on the superiority of a carbon tax or fee over the cap and trade mechanism. I find it persuasive and reproduce it in full below."

• War costs, while high, are a small part of budget deficits, The State (December 6, 2009) By David Lightman.

  "Look at who's pushing this. It's people opposed to the war," said Roberton Williams, budget analyst at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center."

• Extend the estate tax, The Washington Post (December 3, 2009).

  "In 2011, according to estimates from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, only 100 such entities would have to pay any estate tax, and virtually none would have to be liquidated to pay the tax. Nonetheless, the estate tax would continue to bring in badly needed revenue even at this level: $266 billion over the next 10 years."

• House votes to make current estate tax permanent, The Washington Post, Capitol Briefing blog (December 3, 2009) By Ben Pershing.

  "The current rates leave roughly 0.2 percent of all estates subject to taxation in 2009, according to the Tax Policy Center, a think tank. Since the $3.5 million per-person exemption is not indexed for inflation, that percentage will gradually increase over time."

• Economists:Mobility Programs Only Help Higher-Income Households, Dow Jones Newswires (December 3, 2009) By Kristina Peterson.

  "Tax subsidies for new homeowners, for instance, generally bypass lower-income families, said economists speaking at the Urban Institute on Tuesday. As a result, people at the lowest and highest rungs of the economy tend to stick there."

• Congress scrambles to extend estate tax, The Associate Press (December 1, 2009) By Stephen Ohlemacher.

  "Currently, the tax affects few estates. In 2009, about 5,500 estates will be subject to the tax, according to projections from the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. That's 0.23 percent of all estates."

November

• All I Want for Christmas is a Decent Almanac of Tax Reform Ideas, The Atlantic (November 30, 2009) By Derek Thompson.

  "Still it bears repeating that I don't know any serious thinkers who say we can fix the deficit without raising taxes beyond the top one percent. And yet the Obama budget for 2012 envisions extending the Bush tax cuts, extending Make Work Pay credits, patching the AMT (which would compel more high-bracket earners to pay more). Here are some key graphs I plucked from the Tax Policy Center."

• Health care bills target wealthy taxpayers, Chicago Tribune (November 22, 2009) By Janet Hook.

  "Taxing the rich works because they've got the money," said Robertson Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. But, he said, "You can't go to that well over and over again."

• Tax credit hits mark with North Jersey buyers, The Record  (November 22, 2009) By Kathleen Lynn.

  "Most of the people who will get the credit would have bought houses anyway," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow with the Tax Policy Center in Washington. He thinks the federal money would be better spent to help distressed homeowners — especially those who have lost their jobs — ride out the economic storm and stay in their homes."

• Senate tax hike misses the mark, CNNMoney.com (November 20, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "Finding the revenue to pay for health reform was always going to be a huge challenge," wrote tax expert Howard Gleckman, editor of the TaxVox blog. "It still is, but we are beginning to see the outlines of a deal - a little income tax surcharge here, a dollop of insurance premium excise tax there, and more than a few cats and dogs."

• House v. Senate: Who Should We Tax for Health Care?, The Atlantic (November 19, 2009) By Derek Thompson.

  "I'm interested in how the Senate health care bill raises taxes to pay for health care differently from the House version. The ever-useful Howard Gleckman at TaxVox has a good breakdown."

• Millions to Owe IRS Due for Stimulus Credit, The Wall Street Journal (November 16, 2009) By Martin Vaughan.

  "Elaine Maag, a research associate at the nonprofit Tax Policy Center, said Congress and Treasury officials knew from the outset that the credit could get money into the economy quickly, but at the risk that some taxpayers would ultimately have to pay money back."

• Realtors hold high hopes for more sales, TheSunNews.com (November 6, 2009) By Adva Saldinger.

  "The real problem in the housing market is the excess supply, and the goal was to help reduce that supply, he said. There is little evidence to show if the tax credit has motivated buyers that would not have otherwise purchased a home, Williams said."

• You Get a Tax Credit! You Get a Tax Credit!, The Atlantic (November 6, 2009) By Derek Thompson.

  "TaxVox, a Tax Policy Center blog, sighs that this extended tax credit, which follows on the heels of Cash for Clunkers, a credit for car swaps, presages a future in which tax credits are handed out like cars on a special episode of Oprah."

• Obama set to sign a big tax break for homebuyers, Associated Press (November 5, 2009) By Stephen Ohlemacher.

  "Essentially we're giving money to people for doing nothing different," said Ted Gayer, co-director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank."

• No Way Around Estate Taxes, It Seems, The Wall Street Journal (November 4, 2009) By Brian Cronk.

  "This year, the federal exemption rose to $3.5 million per individual, or as much as $7 million per married couple. At the current level, only 5,500 estates a year are federally taxable. That is down from the 17,500 estates that would have faced death taxes under the previous $2 million limit, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates."

• Faux Stimulus Is No Stimulus, The Huffington Post (November 4, 2009) By Harry Moroz.

  "The carryback loss provision is a also a poorly targeted provision, receiving a "C" in the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of the stimulative effect of tax measures."

• No Credit To Congress On Deficit, Forbes.com (November 4, 2009) By Brian Wingfield.

  "Almost everything disappears at the end of next year," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center here. "If that happens, almost everyone who pays taxes will see a substantial tax increase."

• Realtors group says pending home sales climb, Los Angeles Times (November 2, 2009) By Alejandro Lazo.

  "It is propping up the market," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington."

• Uptick of home purchases proves encouraging, The Olympian (November 2, 2009).

  "Ted Gayer, an economist at nonprofit public policy group the Brookings Institution, estimates that 2 million or more people would take advantage of a tax credit if it was extended for a full year. The National Association of Home Builders estimates the tax credit would generate an additional 383,000 home sales which would create 347,000 jobs, generate $16.1 billion in wages and $12.1 billion in business income."

October

• State Death Taxes Are the Latest Worry, The Wall Street Journal (October 31, 2009) By Laura Saunders.

  "That is down from the 17,500 estates that would have faced death taxes under the previous $2 million limit, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates."

• US Summers: Positive 3Q GDP Shows Economy Turning The Corner, The Wall Street Journal (October 29, 2009) By Michael S. Derby.

  "Summers did note, however, "none of us would want to go back even to the kind of regime that was in place through most of Ronald Reagan's presidency." According to the Tax Policy Center, the top marginal tax rate in 1980 was 70%, falling to 28% in 1988, the last year of Reagan's presidency."

• VAT Attack! The Mysterious Christina Romer & Higher Taxes, Reuters Blog (October 28, 2009) By James Pethokoukis.

  "Indeed, earlier in the speech she references the work of economists William Gale and Alan Auberach in this Brookings report: Even if rising health care costs are an important component of the long-term problem, they are not necessarily “the” cause of the fiscal gap. The estimated gap is increased by more than 5 percentage points of GDP just by continuation of the policies that were enacted during the Bush Administration. … It will prove difficult to close the gap entirely via modifications to existing taxes and spending programs. A new revenue source, such as a value added tax (VAT), may be needed. A VAT imposed at a rate between 15 and 20 percent would essentially close the fiscal gap under the Administration’s budget."

• Easing Impact of a Tax Rise, New York Times (October 28, 2009) By David Cay Johnston.

  "That’s because the tax cuts sponsored by President George W. Bush lapse at the end of next year. Those cuts will have saved individuals, and cost the government, $2.34 trillion, according to calculations the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute, made for The New York Times. The Bush and Obama administrations have called the center’s past calculations reliable. Interest on the money borrowed to finance those tax cuts equals a month worth of income taxes paid to the government by individuals."

• Fears of a New Chill in Home Sales, New York Times (October 27, 2009) By David Streitfeld.

  "That is an expensive proposition, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center who has closely followed the issue. "The bigger threat to the housing market is not the reduction in demand from the end of the credit, but the continuing wave of foreclosures we’re likely to see over the next 18 months," he said."

• A Drop in the Wrong Bucket, New York Times (October 27, 2009) By David Leonhardt.

  "President Obama’s own economic advisers raised objections, as my colleague Jackie Calmes has reported. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution told me she thought the idea was crazy — and then noted she was in her 70s. Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington, says that the checks "seem to be pure pandering to seniors."

• GREENSTEIN: Don't make things worse, The Washington Times (October 27, 2009) By Robert Greenstein.

  "As a result, only the very top estates in America are subject to the estate tax -- about one of every 500 estates, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, or just 0.2 percent of all Americans who die. And, due to the exemptions and other features of the estate tax, those who do pay the tax actually pay an average of 20 percent, not 45 percent."

• Washington Wrangles Over Home Buyer Tax Credit, CNNMoney.com Blog (October 26, 2009) By Carla Fried.

  "Isakson better hope the White House doesn’t carefully read a Brookings Institution smackdown of the home buyer tax Credit cost-benefit. Brookings’ Ted Geyer estimates that about 85 percent of people who are expected to use the 2009 homebuyer credit would have bought anyway, and the taxpayer cost to generate additional home sales works out to a hefty government subsidy of $43,000 per sale."

• Economists give mixed reviews of NJ tax plans, Associated Press (October 24, 2009) By Geoff Mulvihill.

  "Kim Rueben, a public finance economist at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said that when resources are scarce, it makes sense to concentrate aid toward those who need it most."

• The State of Estate Taxes, New York Times (October 22, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "In 2009, less than one-quarter of 1 percent of people who die will leave estates big enough for the federal government to tax, according to Roberton Williams at the Tax Policy Center. That’s the smallest percentage in at least 75 years, and it will soon drop to zero."

• Federal Revenue at Lowest Share of G.D.P. Since 1950, New York Times (October 21, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "As Roberton Williams wrote on the TaxVox blog on Monday, federal revenue is especially low this year for three main reasons: tax cuts in this year’s economic stimulus, the collapse of the economy (which means people and companies earn less money, and therefore pay less in taxes), and the Bush tax cuts from earlier this decade."

• Corporate Tax Breaks Get Scrutiny, The Wall Street Journal (October 21, 2009) By Jonathan Weisman and John D. McKinnon.

  "They wouldn't put an option forward unless they thought it was a good option, otherwise it would be thousands of pages long," said Rosanne Altshuler, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who was executive director of President George W. Bush's tax-overhaul commission."

• Like it or not, here comes more stimulus, CNN Money.com (October 21, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "A hiring credit was put in place during the Carter administration and the consensus among researchers is that two-thirds of the 2.1 million jobs created by the credit would have been created without it, according to a post on Tax Vox, a blog of the Tax Policy Center edited by Howard Gleckman."

• Doubling Down On the Wrong Housing Policy, Washington Post (October 18, 2009) By Charles Lane.

  "With luck, these improvisations will work. Even if they do, the price will be high. Take just one policy measure, the $8,000 tax credit for new homebuyers, which Congress might soon extend. According to a recent article by Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution, it would cost the government about $15 billion, or about $43,000 per additional home sale."

• Tax credit for hiring gaining support, United Press International (October 7, 2009).

  "Some bad ideas never go away," said senior research associate Howard Gleckman at the Urban Institute. "It's just providing incentives to lots of companies that probably aren't going to make it," he said."

• VAT attack! More on Obama, Pelosi and the value-added tax, Reuters Blogs (October 7, 2009) By James Pethokoukis.

  "When you start looking for signs of the VAT virus, you start seeing them everywhere. Here are some excerpts from Howard Gleckman over at TaxVox, the blog of the Tax Policy Center: I’ve just spent 90 minutes listening to five Washington hands discuss "the financial and economic consequences of an exploding debt.. … Urban’s Bob Reischauer and Rudy Penner (both former CBO directors), American Enterprise Institute Congress-watcher Norm Ornstein, TPC co-founder Len Burman, and international economist Mike Mussa agreed that the depths of the medium and long-term problem can’t be overestimated..."

• The High Price of Being a Gay Couple, The New York Times (October 2, 2009) By A Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber.

  "We received assistance from Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, who performed our tax analysis, which required simulating more than 900 income tax returns, in part because we followed the partners for 50 years. We also decided to run all scenarios across the three states so that the results would not be skewed by different state taxes. We’ve outlined all the detail in a workbook linked to the online version of this column."

• US Sen Wyden Lashes Out At Finance Committee Health Bill, Dow Jones Newswires (October 1, 2009) By Martin Vaughan.

  "This legislation has been stripped of the principles of consumer choice and competition," Wyden said in a speech at the Tax Policy Center, a Washington non- partisan think tank."

• Our view on inheritance tax: Unless estate law changes, it pays to die in 2010, USA Today (October 1, 2009).

  "Over the past 10 years, there has been a gradual recognition that it makes little sense to shower tax breaks on a tiny sliver of the nation's wealthiest citizens (only about 0.6% of estates were subject to the tax in 2008, according to the Tax Policy Center), even moreso when less affluent Americans are feeling the effects of a brutal recession. At a time of record, trillion dollar federal deficits, it's even harder to justify the revenue loss. Repeal advocates rarely bother to say where else they'd get the money because the inevitable answer is that it would come from people of lesser means. And with Democrats now in control of the White House and Congress, political support for killing the estate tax has sharply eroded."

September

• Tax Dodging, Slate (September 29, 2009) By Christopher Beam.

  "Who's right? Some tax policy analysts dismiss the question as merely academic. "It's a distinction without a difference," says Robert Moffitt of the Heritage Foundation, calling the question a "metaphysical" one. "It becomes semantics as much as anything," says Bob Williams of the Tax Policy Center."

• U.S. sees debt, deficit everywhere one year after economic crisis, Xinhua Newswire (September 23, 2009).

  "But William Gale, budget deficit expert at the Brookings Institution, begs to differ. In a paper he wrote earlier this summer, Gale argued that both deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio were projected to be at "unsustainable" levels in the next decade, even if "everything goes the way the Obama administration wants and the economy recovers and grows steadily" for the next 10 years."

• How Health Care Projections Can Go Wrong, Atlantic Online (September 23, 2009) By Derek Thompson.

  "Here's Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center on the crazy inaccurate projections of Medicare D, the prescription drug bill passed under President Bush: The March, 2004 Medicare trustees report predicted 2008 premiums would range from $12.7 billion to $19.7 billion. Actual 2008 premiums: $5 billion. The trustees figured 2008 spending would range from $77 billion to $131.4 billion, with a mid-range of $101.9 billion."

• When is a Tax Not a Tax? When Obama Says So, Apparently, OpposingViews.com (September 23, 2009) By Christopher Beam.

  "The fact that it is imposed on people and they have no choice in paying it, and the fact that it's administered through the tax system all make it look like a tax," [Roberton] Williams [of the Tax Policy Center] said."

• Grading the Stimulus: Too Early to Tell or Stop Spending?, International Business Times (September 22, 2009).

  "William Gale, a director at the Brookings Institute looks toward economic indicators which he says suggest that there is a positive effect due to the stimulus. He noted higher consumer spending in the spring of 2009 despite a falling stock market at the time, rising state and local purchases in the second quarter, more federal purchases. He says the Obama Administration’s policy to support the economy may have created an “expectational effect” that could have led to more investment. He also cited forecasting models from Goldman Sachs and Macro Advisers who saw a 2 or 3 percent increase in growth, in line with White House estimates."

• Healthcare mandates: Are they a tax or not?, The Christian Science Monitor (September 22, 2009) By Mark Trumbull.

  "The answer may be nuanced, Toder says, because the government will be offering subsidies in addition to laying down the mandate. Some families might get a product they want – the insurance – thanks to the subsidy. Others, who get a smaller subsidy or who don’t want as much insurance, may feel taxed."

• Editorial: Close the door on housing tax credit, Denver Post (September 17, 2009).

  "But experts at The Tax Policy Center, a function of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, argue that the $8,000 credit is one of the worst provisions in the stimulus bill."

• A Battle Brews over Future of the Home Buyer Tax Credit, DSNews.com (September 17, 2009) By Adam Weinstein.

  "Is this the best way to spend money we don’t have?" asked senior fellow Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, a Washington-based research program run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute."

• When Work Doesn't Pay For The Middle Class, Forbes (September 16, 2009) By Janet Novack and Stephane Fitch.

  "Rosanne Altshuler, codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, worries that all the tax gotchas could "erode confidence in the system, and that could lead to a bigger compliance problem."

• Fight in Congress Looms on Tax Break for Home Buyers, The New York Times (September 16, 2009) By David Streitfeld .

  "On the other side of the issue is the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. It labeled the original credit as one of the worst provisions of the stimulus package, on the grounds that the money is a bonus for people who would buy a house anyway. The center has an even dimmer view of extending the credit to all buyers."

• Home buying tax credit is on the line, UPI.com (September 16, 2009).

  "Not all agree. "Is this the best way to spend money we don't have," Tax Policy Center senior fellow Roberton Williams asked."

• Alternative minimum tax meant to police super-rich, but filings prove otherwise, The Star-Ledger (September 12, 2009) By Venuri Siriwardane.

  "That's not necessarily a bad thing," said Kim Rueben, an economist and senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center. "It means New Jersey residents have higher incomes than other Americans."

• Income Gap Shrinks in Slump at the Expense of the Wealthy, The Wall Street Journal (September 10, 2009) By Bob Davis and Robert Frank.

  "Less income flowing to the top could have broad effects, from the amount of revenue the government collects to the kinds of cars piling up on dealers' lots. For instance, the top 1% of earners will pay 36% of all federal individual income taxes this year, according to an estimate from the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. If their income softens, so will federal revenue, making budgets harder to meet."

• Congress may consider tax on executives' health plans, Los Angeles Times (September 8, 2009) By Ken Bensinger.

  "That income-tax exemption costs the government about $240 billion a year in receipts, according to an Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimate. It's essentially a subsidy to encourage private health coverage. But because it disproportionately rewards those in higher tax brackets, it also opens the door to ever-more-luxurious plans, experts said."

• Why the U.S. needs a Value Added Tax, Reuters Blogs (September 8, 2009) By Christopher Swann.

  "Canada, for example, gives up about a third of potential revenue by excusing food, drugs and transportation from the tax. Even if the United States did the same, a 10 percent tax rate could raise $500 billion a year, according to Eric Toder, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center."

• White House Tax Panel Stays Out Of Public Eye, Dow Jones Newswires (September 8, 2009) By Martin Vaughan.

  "Rosanne Altshuler, who was senior staff economist to that panel and now co- directs the Tax Policy Center, said the group benefitted from hearing from a diverse range of taxpayers about problems with the code. "You and I are touched by the tax system in a very different way than low-income individuals," she said."

• Fix health care. But fix the deficits, too, CNNMoney.com (September 8, 2009) By Alan J. Auerbach and William G. Gale.

  "President Obama says reforming health care is central to the task of getting the government's long-term financial problems under control. And he's right."

• 4 stimulus breaks due to run out at year end, San Francisco Chronicle (September 6, 2009) By Kathleen Pender.

  "I haven't heard a peep" about extending the deduction, says Roberton Williams, senior fellow with the Tax Policy Center. "The fact that we are seeing some economic revival means there is less pressure to do more for a specific industry."

August

• Tax Pledge Is a Target As Deficits, Debt Grow, Washington Post (August 29, 2009) By Lori Montgomery.

  "If you rule out inflating our way out of the problem and defaulting on the debt, there are two ways: Cut spending or raise taxes," said William G. Gale, an expert on fiscal policy at the Brookings Institution. With more than 80 percent of federal spending devoted to politically untouchable programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he said, "it's going to be really hard to make significant headway on the spending side. So that means you've got to think about taxes."

• It’s Hard to Worry About a Deficit 10 Years Out, The New York Times (August 28, 2009) By Floyd Norris.

  "The numbers to back each interpretation come from a new study by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, estimating effective federal tax rates using both current law and President Obama’s legislative proposals. The figures include all federal taxes, allocating corporate taxes to the owners of those companies and payroll taxes to the employees. Middle-income people tend to pay higher payroll taxes than the rich, because there is no Social Security tax on high incomes. The poorest are exempt from income tax, but do pay payroll taxes if they earn money."

• Why the deficit will raise taxes, CNNMoney.com (August 27, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "For instance, the president's proposal to raise taxes only on high-income families would raise an additional $600 billion over 10 years, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center."

• America’s perilous fiscal future: slow growth, high taxes, Reuters, Political Risk blog (August 26, 2009) By James Pethokoukis.

  "Howard Gleckman over at TaxVox does a great job on the new government budget forecasts."

• New Jersey Taxpayers Are Most Likely to Face A.M.T., The New York Times, Economix blog (August 26, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "New Jersey taxpayers are subject to the alternative minimum tax more frequently than residents of any other state, according to 2007 data released by the Tax Policy Center."

• Culver to hire government efficiency firm, Des Moines Register (August 25, 2009) By Lee Rod.

  "Kim Rueben, a policy finance economist at the Urban Institute, said it is difficult to compare differences in how state leaders go about cutting budgets in tough times. "A lot of what happens is going to depend on what's going on in the state at the time," she said. "But one thing is clear: There is no easy answer this year. It's a really different climate. All states have been through recessions before, but most have never experienced anything of the magnitude of what we're seeing now."

• Conference Focuses On Deficits, Stimulus, Wall Street Journal (August 24, 2009) By John Hilsenrath.

  "Large long-term deficits could cause "serious economic disruptions," said economist Alan Auerbach of the University of California at Berkeley, who co-wrote a paper presented here with William Gale of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank largely populated by Democrats. Over the next decade, they estimated in a paper written earlier this year, the U.S. budget deficit will add up to $10 trillion, and possibly more. Credit markets, they added, have begun to signal a risk of U.S. government default, something unheard of a few years ago."

• Auerbach Says Any Fresh U.S. Stimulus Could Be ‘Poorly Timed’, Bloomberg (August 22, 2009) By Timothy R. Homan.

  "The U.S. economy is showing signs of recovery, and the addition of another stimulus package at this point could turn out to be poorly timed," Alan Auerbach, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and William Gale, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a paper for the meeting today in Jackson Hole, Wyoming."

• U.S. stimulus was appropriate, more may not be: economists, Reuters (August 22, 2009) By Reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by James Dalgleish.

  "According to Alan Auerbach of the University of California at Berkeley and William Gale of the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, any second effort now may be aimed at an economy already turning the corner. "The U.S. economy is showing signs of recovery, and the addition of another stimulus package at this point could turn out to be poorly timed," Auerbach and Gale concluded in a paper presented to top policy-makers and academics gathered for a Federal Reserve-sponsored conference."

• Consumer Spending Goes to the Dogs (and Cats), CNNMoney.com, Money & Main Street blog (August 21, 2009) By Carla Fried.

  "But I just had to sigh in disbelief at a House Resolution introduced last month that would allow an annual tax deduction of up to $3,500 a year for “qualified pet expenses.” No, I am not making this up. As Howard Gleckman so pithily wrote at the Tax Vox blog, this non-essential tax break seems a bit out of touch for the times given the massive federal deficit. What’s your take on this pet project."

• One thing experts agree on: The national debt will only go higher, Medill Reports (August 20, 2009) By Felice Baker.

  "Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, said the $915 billion spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the economic downturn, will continue to require heavy government spending beyond the foreseeable future. "A lot of Congressmen, even some Democrats, are using this opportunity to decry heavy fiscal expenditure, but in spite of the higher deficit during the first eight months of the Obama administration compared with the same period in 2008, the reality is that the current administration is not really spending at that much of a faster rate than the Bush administration," said Williams."

• Which tax should rise to pay for health care overhaul?, McClatchy Newspapers (August 19, 2009) By David Lightman.

  "Leonard Burman, the director of the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, still thought the tax could be politically viable. "Economics 101 tells us that it doesn't matter whether the seller or buyer writes the check to the Treasury: The after-tax price facing seller and buyer is the same, but politically, having insurers 'pay' the tax may avoid a major political problem," he said."

• With no budget, Connecticut's sales tax holiday makes no sense, Connecticut Post (August 18, 2009) By Marian Gail Brown.

  "Kim Reuben, an economist with the Urban and Brookings Institute's Tax Policy Center, thinks that for consumers with tight household budgets, sales-tax holidays may make it more likely that they will "shift their purchases to these tax-free days. When you are feeling wealthier, you are less concerned about the timing of when you make these purchases." Reuben, who sympathizes with the tax-amnesty goal, doubts it will make any of us buy more over the long run."

• Meltdown 101: Value-added tax on Washington radar, Associated Press (August 18, 2009) By Dave Carpenter.

  "Burman, who has worked closely with Democratic lawmakers, suspects there's already a consensus in both the House and the Senate, with a significant number of Republicans among them, that a VAT is needed. But that doesn't mean it has real political support. "The number who are willing to say so in public, you can probably count on one or two hands," said Burman, now a professor at Syracuse University's Center for Policy Research. "So I wouldn't bet a lot of money on a VAT happening any time in the next few years."

• Taxes? Through the roof, America!, Reuters, Political Risk blog (August 17, 2009) By James Pethokoukis.

  "This blog post from TaxVox sums up the common wisdom around here: Politically feasible tax increases alone won’t solve the problem. Neither will cutting spending. In fact, if history is any guide, we’re unlikely to do much of anything on the outlay side. We will certainly have to slash the growth of healthcare to keep the budget from spiraling totally out of control. But that’s likely to take the form of "bending the cost curve" to get gradual savings over many years. In the near term, I suspect taxes will do the heavy lifting. And that will require either major tax reform or tapping new revenue sources."

• The same stupid song..., The Examiner (August 16, 2009) By Terry Crowley.

  "Well, first let's examine President Obama's plans. First, he will assess social security taxes on incomes above $250,000. One liberal columnist noted with satisfaction that this will bring the top rates back to where they were in the 70's, before our economic boom of the last quarter century. Smart, right? According to the Tax Policy Center, Obamas tax policies already are pushing the total tax on labor in those brackets to close to 60%, and in states like California and New York, they will be even higher."

• The Last Taboo, Kaiser Health News (August 14, 2009) By Howard Gleckman.

  "Yet, there remains one subject Americans seem unable to talk about in an honest and rational way: the inevitable decline of old age. We see this fear in the frenzied controversy over whether Medicare should pay doctors for end-of-life consultations. And we see it in the unwillingness of Congress to confront those very real long-term care issues that are barely skirting the margins of the health reform debate."

• Speaking of Myth-Busting, National Review Online (August 14, 2009) By John Hood.

  "Preventive care is a good thing; it helps individuals avoid illness. But it will not generate savings, especially in the short-term," said Len Burman, director of the Washington, DC-based Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute."

• Clouds Over Bermuda's Island Tax Haven, BusinessWeek (August 11, 2009) By Esmé E. Deprez.

  "The mere prospect of such a change has already provoked a mini-exodus of corporations. In the past three months, companies such as Tyco (TYC), Accenture (ACN), Ingersoll-Rand (IR), and Cooper Industries (CBE), have moved—or made plans to move—their incorporation from Bermuda to other locales such as Ireland and Switzerland. "These firms are facing a lot of uncertainty and are very worried about the legislation that may come out of Washington," says Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center."

• Thousands of California Elders Losing Long-Term Care, New America Media (August 10, 2009) by Paul Kleyman.

  "Despite much progress, home and community services remains badly underfunded in many states," said Howard Gleckman, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of Caring for Our Parents. "Many states have long waiting lists, others offer such limited care that it doesn't work for many people," he said."

• Editorial: Grim tax receipts demand attention, Journal Star (August 8, 2009).

  "William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, said: "The (tax-receipt) numbers for 2009 are striking, head-snapping. But what really matters is what happens next."

• Tiptoeing toward the truth about taxes, Boston Globe (August 7, 2009) By Scot Lehigh.

  "Adds Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center: "It is inevitable that we are going to have to tax more than the rich going forward. If we don't, we will almost double the national debt over 10 years."

• Congress plunks down $2 billion more for clunkers, Medill Reports (August 7, 2009) By Felice Baker.

  "Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, warned that the $1.8 trillion deficit the nation faces needs to be taken into consideration, in spite of the need for stimulus. He said the $3 billion spent on CARS overall focuses in too sharply on only one sector of the economy, in spite of expected multiplier effects."

• Talk on taxes creates doubts on Obama vow, Boston Globe (August 4, 2009).

  "The numbers for 2009 are striking, head-snapping. But what really matters is what happens next," Gale said. "If it's just one year, then it's a remarkable thing, but it's totally manageable. If the economy doesn't recover soon, it doesn't matter what your social, economic, and political agenda is. There's not going to be any revenue to pay for it."

• 5 estate-tax myths that won't die, MSNMoney.com (August 3, 2009) by Liz Pulliam Weston.

  "And the vast majority of the taxes owed would be paid by huge estates. Under Obama's plan, for example, 84% of the total taxes owed would be paid by estates worth more than $10 million, said Leonard Burman, the center's director and a former senior analyst for the Congressional Budget Office. The average estate-tax bill would be about $3 million, or 19% of total estate value."

• Health Bills Allow Some a Religious Exemption, CQ Politics (August 3, 2009) by Maura Reynolds.

  "To get the exemption, taxpayers must provide evidence they are members of a qualifying sect that has been in existence continuously since 1950. As Roberton Williams, a tax expert at the Urban Institute, put it, "People who try to set up their house as a church, well, that doesn’t fly."

• Editorial: Tax is not really an economic bad word, St. Petersburg Times (August 3, 2009).

  "According to data compiled by the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, only 23 percent of taxpayers who would be subject to the surcharge derive most of their income from business profits. Most of the proposed surtax would be paid by doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, corporate executives and people with lots of investment income."

• What taxes might work to cover health care reform, St. Petersburg Times (August 2, 2009).

  "I think it's a great idea," says Leonard Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C. "If we can't raise the income tax to pay for health care, then we should do what every other country in the world is doing, which is enact a VAT. It's pretty easy to collect and easy to administer."

• Editorial: Taxing benefits could be a two-fer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (August 1, 2009).

  "Just like for anything else, if you got 30% off on your next car purchase, you'd probably buy a bigger car," Leonard Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C., told National Public Radio recently."

July

• Burman Departs Tax Policy Center, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (July 31, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center and contributor to the nonpartisan group’s TaxVox blog, is leaving the Urban Institute in Washington for the Maxwell School of Syracuse University."

• Tax Surcharge For Health Care Faces Broad-Based Opposition , Investor’s Business Daily (July 31, 2009) By Jed Graham.

  "Choosing to finance health care reform by taxing the rich is bad economic policy, bad health policy, bad budget policy and poor leadership," wrote Brookings Institution economist William Gale in a forum at National Journal Online."

• Morning Reading, Marketplace.com (July 30, 2009) by Scott Jagow.

  "It's probably not just rich people," says Len Burman, an economist who runs the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute. "Actually, government employees get really generous health insurance plans, unionized employees can get very generous health insurance plans."

• Insurers Struggle In Downturn As Senators Consider Adding New Tax, Kaiser Health News (July 30, 2009).

  "Some people have very generous health insurance plans," Len Burman, of the Urban Institute's Tax Policy Center, told National Public Radio. "[T]hey encourage them to spend more on medical care than they would if they had less generous plans. So part of the idea is that if you limited the tax benefits for the very generous health insurance plans, people would spend less and that would actually help lower health costs overall."

• Pearlstein: Health Reform Threatened by Conservatives' Anti-Tax Fantasy, The Washington Post (July 29, 2009) By Steven Pearlstein.

  "According to data compiled by the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, only 23 percent of taxpayers who would be subject to the surcharge derive most of their income from business profits. The bulk of the proposed surtax would be paid by doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, corporate executives and people with lots of investment income."

• Another Way to Tax 'Gold-Plated' Plans, The Wall Street Journal (July 23, 2009) By John D. McKinnon.

  "A recent analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank that researches social and economic problems, looked at the impact of imposing the tax directly on workers. It estimated that imposing the tax on the top 25% of plans would hit about half of middle-income households, and roughly two-thirds of higher-income households. Some could pay thousands of dollars a year more in taxes depending on how they're structured."

• Your Stake in the Health Overhaul, The Wall Street Journal (July 22, 2009) By Anna Wilde Mathews.

  "The House bill includes a surtax that would affect married couples making more than $350,000 a year and individuals with incomes above $280,000. According to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution think tanks, the surtax, which is at a higher rate for the biggest earners, would affect 0.5% of individual filers and 2.8% of married filers. For a married couple making between $500,000 and $1 million total, the average increase would be around $2,600 a year. A single person in that category would pay on average around $3,000 more."

• Congress Tackles Long-Term Care, The New York Times, The New Old Age blog (July 22, 2009) By Paula Span.

  "To date, two of the five Congressional committees working on a health care overhaul have adopted the proposed legislation; the others have yet to vote. Howard Gleckman, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute, pointed out that while some insurance companies oppose the idea, "the biggest problem the C.L.A.S.S. Act has isn’t opposition, but indifference — a sense on the Hill that they just don’t want to mess with long-term care."

• Health care: A tax is needed, but what kind?, The Dallas Morning News (July 21, 2009) By William McKenzie.

  "Second, while I recognize that some may want to stick it to the rich, I think that most all of us should pay our fair share for a reform bill. I would exempt lower-income workers from being stuck with a tax hike, but I agree with tax economist Eric Toder of the Urban Institute, not a conservative group, who told The Times today: I really do not understand the politics of trying to sell health care reform, which is supposed to be for the benefit of vast majority of Americans, and saying it should only be paid for by people making over $1 million. If it's worth doing, and I think it is, more people should be willing to pay for it."

• Democrats May Limit Tax Increases for Health Care Plan, The New York Times (July 21, 2009) By David M. Herszenhorn and Robert Pear.

  "I really do not understand the politics of trying to sell health care reform, which is supposed to be for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans, and saying it should be paid for only by people making over $1 million," Mr. Toder said. "If it’s worth doing, and I think it is, more people should be willing to pay for it."

• Tax the Rich!, The New Republic (July 21, 2009) By John B. Judis.

  "According to a study by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, the surcharge in the House proposal, combined with the Obama administration's proposal to let the Bush tax cuts expire, would lead to the top one percent of households paying a 34.4 percent tax rate on their incomes, which is well below the tax rate that the top one percent paid during the golden days of American capitalism after World War II."

• Bad time to be rich? Only if you don't like taxes, The Associated Press (July 20, 2009) By Stephen Ohlemacher.

  "This year, 47 percent of filers won't owe any federal income taxes — including some families making as much as $50,000 a year, according to separate projections by the Tax Policy Center and Deloitte Tax."

• Obama challenges GOP critics on health care, The Associated Press (July 20, 2009) By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Darlene Superville.

  "The original tax proposal would raise $544 billion over the next decade. More than 90 percent of the money would come from couples making more than $1 million a year and individuals making more than $500,000, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. That means Pelosi would have to find just under $50 billion in additional savings."

• U.S. Companies Paid More Taxes Overseas, BusinessWeek (July 16, 2009) By Esmé E. Deprez.

  "While money that may once have been destined for the U.S. Treasury is redirected to bank accounts overseas, this outcome ultimately benefits the U.S. economy in the bigger picture, contends Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "This shows us that more and more opportunities for profitability and expansion are abroad. Whose firms do you want to take advantage of those other markets?"

• Taxing the rich: There are limits, CNNMoney.com (July 16, 2009) By Carolyn Bigda.

  "What’s the alternative? Len Burman, director of TPC, offers one option in this May editorial in The Washington Times. In the meantime, Obama can witness firsthand just how well targeted tax hikes work: While higher state tax rates were introduced this month, the rates are retroactive to January 1, 2009."

• House Dems' health bill would tax rich, USA Today (July 15, 2009) By John Fritze.

  "You have a health plan that's meant to benefit everybody ... but it's being paid for by only 2.1 million taxpayers," said Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. "It's difficult to raise revenue this way."

• Tax the rich to pay for ... everything?, CNNMoney.com (July 14, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "But those same tax cuts also increased the ranks of those who end up owing no income tax - the majority of whom are not high income. The Tax Policy Center now estimates that after taking the tax breaks for which they're eligible, 47% of tax-filing households will have no federal income tax liability this year."

• Tax The Rich?, Forbes (July 10, 2009) By Bruce Bartlett.

  "Second, Republicans were responsible for a large expansion in the number of Americans who pay no federal income taxes. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only 35% of federal tax returns had no tax liability in 2000; by 2008 that percentage had risen to 43%. According to the latest calculation from the Tax Policy Center, 47% of tax filers will owe no federal income taxes this year."

• Op-Ed. Give Up A Benefit, Gain Jobs, The Washington Post (July 9, 2009) By Leonard E. Burman.

  "With union membership shrinking and wages strained, it might sound crazy to argue that labor should voluntarily give up a huge fringe benefit: tax-free health insurance provided by employers. But it should. In the long run, capping the amount of health insurance that employers can provide tax-free would raise workers' wages, partially protect them from layoffs and speed rehiring after a downturn."

• Secondary Sources: Global Crisis, Cash vs. Stocks, Who Pays Taxes, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (July 8, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "On the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog, Bob Williams looks at who pays no taxes. “Nearly half of all families and individuals will pay no income tax this year. But who are they? It turns out that whether a taxpayer is single or married, is elderly, or has children makes a big difference."

• Here comes the next fiscal crisis, Los Angeles Times (July 8, 2009) By Alan J. Auerbach and William G. Gale.

  "The U.S. confronts not one but two economic challenges: Its worst recession since the Depression and a growing imbalance between federal spending and revenues that makes its underlying fiscal policy unsustainable."

• U.S. House May Include Surtax on Wealthy in Health-Care Package, Bloomberg (July 7, 2009) By Ryan J. Donmoyer.

  "According to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group, about 4.3 million of 150 million U.S. households filing tax returns will earn more than $200,000 this year."

• National Long-Term Care Insurance: How Much Would It Cost?, Kaiser Health News (July 6, 2009) By Howard Gleckman.

  "Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, has sparked an important debate over long-term care insurance by proposing national coverage that would be available to everyone. But the Kennedy plan, called the CLASS Act, leaves unanswered the question that is probably most important to consumers: How much would the premium be?"

• Why taxes will need to go up, CNNMoney.com (July 1, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "The key message is the future is now. The future has arrived," said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, in a Brookings video discussing a sobering report on the fiscal predicament that hecoauthored with Alan Auerbach, director of the Burch Center for Tax Policy and Finance at the University of California, Berkeley."

June

• Glut-The-Beast Strategy Lifts VAT Prospects, Investor’s Business Daily (June 30, 2009) By J.D. Foster.

  "President Obama's budget proffers the VAT as one way to fund his health care initiative. And respected liberal policy gurus such as Len Berman of the Tax Policy Center are thumping the VAT as well."

• Trickle-Down Economics Fails to Deliver as Promised, Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics Blog (June 30, 2009) By Michael S. Derby.

  "The idea has had enough power to be used as part of a long process to lower tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. According to the Tax Policy Center, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. stood at 70% when Reagan was elected in 1980, falling steadily to 28% by 1989, before it began to rise modestly. The top marginal rate now stands at 35% against a peak of 94% in 1945."

• The Work-Up: Obama and Congress Clash on How to Pay for Health Care, The New York Times (June 26, 2009) By Jackie Calmes.

  "Mr. Obama has not given up. He counters that a 28 percent itemized deduction rate for top earners would be the same as under President Ronald Reagan. Just 1.4 percent of households would be affected, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reported. The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University says charitable giving would decrease 2 percent."

• And the A.M.T. Taketh Away, II, nytimes.com's Economix blog (June 25, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "A few weeks back, the Tax Policy Center estimated that the alternative minimum tax would largely squelch the tax cuts President Obama had proposed for upper-middle-income Americans. It's not just these tax cuts, either, that the alternative minimum tax would wipe out. In 2010, it will erase about 18 percent of income tax cuts enacted since 2001, according to the Tax Policy Center, because this onetime "rich people's tax" is not regularly adjusted for inflation."

• Health reform FAQ: Cutting through the noise, CNNMoney.com (June 25, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "If the cost of paying [into the exchange] is high enough, employers are more likely to play," Williams said. Conversely, if it's low enough, it may make more financial sense to drop coverage and send employees to the exchange to pick their own plan."

• $285B switch might remove health hurdle, The Hill (June 24, 2009) By Jeffrey Young.

  "On the other hand, no one in the Obama or Bush administrations or in either party on Capitol Hill ever expected the physician pay cuts to take effect, making the current baseline "totally unrealistic," explained Rudolph Penner, a fellow at the Urban Institute and former CBO director."

• Cheap Health Reform May Not Be a Bargain, Economix blog at NYTimes.com (June 23, 2009) By Len Burman.

  "Policy makers are belatedly coming to the realization that health insurance reform is expensive. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that expanding health insurance coverage would probably cost a trillion dollars or more over 10 years, depending on unspecified details that were almost sure to add to the price."

• The $64,000 Question: Can Health Care Be Paid For Without Breaking the Bank?, Kaiser Health News (June 22, 2009) By Jenny Gold, Eric Pianin and Julie Appleby.

  "Leonard Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, also has advocated the VAT tax."

• Boosting Home Care: An Uphill Battle, Kaiser Health News (June 22, 2009) By Howard Gleckman.

  "Once a senior begins receiving long-term care services, she and her family often are in for two shocks. The first is that Medicare won’t pay beyond perhaps a few months after a hospitalization. The second is that while Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor, may help, chances are it will only do so for nursing home residents."

• Senate Looks to Trim Tax Break for Personal Medical Costs, Dow Jones Newswires (June 22, 2009) By Martin Vaughan.

  "Most likely to be affected by a change to the deduction are households with income between $50,000 and $200,000, according to 2009 estimates from the Tax Policy Center. People in that income group claimed 73.1% of the benefit of all the medical and dental expense deductions, according to the data."

• LTC on the back burner under Obama health plan, Investment News (June 21, 2009) By Darla Mercado.

  "It's inevitable that long term care's delivery and financing issues are going to be addressed by Congress," said Howard Gleckman, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington. "If you look at the cost of Medicaid going forward, as baby boomers age, the cost becomes unsustainable."

• The Achilles' heel of health care reform, The Politico (June 17, 2009) By Bruce Bartlett.

  "Economist Len Burman of the Urban Institute believes that a value-added tax would be a better way of paying for health reform. It has large revenue-raising potential even at low rates and imposes less of an economic burden per dollar raised than any other tax that economists know of."

• 6 States Hitting Residents With Big Tax Hikes, SmartMoney.com (June 16, 2009) By Lisa Scherzer.

  "Pretty much everyone is doing poorly," says Kim Rueben, senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center. "It’s just a question of who's hurting more than others."

• Recovery Zone stimulus means jobs, N.J. officials say, The Philadelphia Inquirer (June 13, 2009) By Matthew Spolar.

  "Though Andrews was excited to announce the new funding for his area, the Tax Policy Center, run by the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, gave the Obama administration's Recovery Zone Bond initiative a C-minus on its Tax Stimulus Report Card."

• The coming long-term care crisis (and why personal finance can’t solve every problem), CNNMoney.com, Money and Main Street blog (June 11, 2009).

  "The best example of this: Paying for long-term care, whether it’s for your aging parents or for yourself. In his new book Caring for Our Parents, the journalist and Urban Institute researcher Howard Gleckman makes a compelling argument that the cost of long-term care will be the next shoe to drop in America’s ongoing health-care crisis."

• Value-Added Tax Makes A Comeback, USNews.com, Capital Commerce blog (June 11, 2009) By Matthew Bandyk.

  "Ok, so the VAT isn't going to destroy your kid's lemonade stand. But the lawn mowers and snow shovelers would still feel its effects. Burman: sales from small retailers exempt from VAT could still be partially taxed because the inputs would be subject to VAT tax. So Johnny would have paid VAT on his snow shovel and road salt."

• Obama faces bipartisan deficit skepticism, The Hill (June 9, 2009) By Sam Youngman and Walter Alarkon.

  "Leonard Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution, said that Obama's pay-go law would help address budget deficits expected to remain above $500 billion annually for the next decade. But Obama and lawmakers still need to do more to rein in spending, especially when they're not subjecting big-ticket items such as the Bush tax cuts and the AMT to the pay-go restrictions."

• The next great crisis: America's debt, Fortune Magazine (June 9, 2009) By Shawn Tully.

  "In 2009 the U.S. will post a deficit of $1.8 trillion, or 13.1% of GDP, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, twice the post-World War II record of 6% in 1983 under Ronald Reagan. Now let's look forward to 2019, the final year for the budget projections for the administration and the CBO. Even in a scenario that assumes healthy economic growth, the CBO puts the 2019 deficit at $1.2 trillion, or 5.7% of GDP. "That wouldn't be a huge number for an economic downturn, but it's extremely high in a full-employment period," says William Gale, an economist at the centrist Brookings Institution. It gets worse from there. Around 2020 the cost of the big entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, soar as the peak wave of baby boomers retire."

• Bipartisan Health Bill Is Possible, Leaders Say, The New York Times (June 8, 2009) By John Harwood.

  "Taxing only the most lavish 10 percent of benefit plans would raise an additional $336 billion in income taxes, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center."

• The Other ‘Big Three’ in the Health Care Debate, CQ Today Online News (June 6, 2009) By John Reichard.

  "The biggest would be eliminating or capping the tax exclusion, which keeps employees from having to pay income and payroll taxes on the premiums employers pay for employee health benefits. Capping the exclusion at the average cost of health insurance in 2009 would raise $1.1 trillion over 10 years, according to Leonard E. Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint program of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution."

• Fed chairman issues warning on instability of deficits, The Hill (June 3, 2009) By Walter Alarkon.

  "Burman has called for a sales tax, suggesting that it be linked to expanded healthcare coverage. He said that a new broad-based tax plan won’t be taken seriously until a Republican lawmaker signals openness to it. But Burman noted that other industrialized countries have approved similar taxes in the past."

• Tax Tips: Hold onto your wallets, North Lake Tahoe Bonanza (June 3, 2009) By Jeff Quinn.

  "Everybody who understands our long-term budget problems understands we’re going to need a new source of revenue, and a VAT is an obvious candidate," notes Leonard Burman, co-director of the Tax Policy Center. "It’s common to the rest of the world, and we don’t have it."

• Stop soaking the not-so-rich, Money Magazine (June 2, 2009) By Janice Revell.

  "But the AMT's income thresholds have never been adjusted for inflation. True, each year Congress passes legislation known as the "AMT patch" to limit the number of middle-class Americans who get hit. But the patch has holes. By 2007 a whopping 4.1 million people owed the tax, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center - including 800,000 people who made less than $200,000. Of that group, 125,000 made less than $100,000."

• 'Special Report' Panel on Paying for Proposed Health Care Initiatives, Fox News (June 1, 2009).

  "The value-added tax is a sales tax basically, but it's collected in stages from each producer. So the farmer would pay 10 percent on the value of the goods that he sells to the wholesaler, who would pay 10 percent on the amount that they add. And then the retailer would collect 10 percent on that margin as well."

• Does AMT Really Work?, The Wall Street Journal (June 1, 2009) By Tom Herman.

  "In essence, the AMT requires millions of people to figure their taxes two ways -- the regular way and a separate way using different rules -- and pay the higher amount. Under the AMT, for example, you can't deduct state and local taxes. For more details, see the Web site of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution (TaxPolicyCenter.org). Type "alternative minimum tax" in the search box."

May

• The same things that got us into this mess, The Globe & Mail (May 30, 2009) By Gordon Pitts.

  "The recession ends - the crisis continues. That's the warning from U.S. economist William Gale, who is emerging as one of the strong voices on the dark side of the forecasting divide. The important thing is not when the global recession ends; that could happen within six months, said Mr. Gale, who heads economic studies at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington."

• U.S. government bonds market needs watching, Financial Post (May 28, 2009) By Alia McMullen.

  "William Gale, vice-president and the director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., said it was "quite possible," the next bubble to pop would be in U.S. government debt."

• Health reform: A $1 trillion question, CNNMoney.com (May 28, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "How much revenue can be raised is entirely dependent on the option chosen. There are no official estimates available from the Congressional Budget Office yet, but the Tax Policy Center estimates that capping the exclusion at the average cost of health insurance in 2009 ($5,370 for individuals; $13,226 for families) and adjusting that cap for inflation every year could raise $848 billion in revenue over 10 years."

• National Sales Tax Chatter Draws Fierce Opposition, FoxNews.com (May 28, 2009) By Judson Berger.

  "Leonard Burman, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, wrote in a Virginia Tax Review article last month that the tax-on-everything could finance health care reform, and could reach a rate of 25 percent."

• Once Considered Unthinkable, U.S. Sales Tax Gets Fresh Look, The Washington Post (May 27, 2009) By Lori Montgomery.

  "Everybody who understands our long-term budget problems understands we're going to need a new source of revenue, and a VAT is an obvious candidate," said Leonard Burman, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, who testified on Capitol Hill this month about his own VAT plan. "It's common to the rest of the world, and we don't have it."

• What's that? A VAT?, Marketplace, Scratch Pad blogt (May 27, 2009) By Scott Jagow.

  "And in a paper published last month in the Virginia Tax Review, (Leonard Burman, co-director of the Tax Policy Center) suggests that a 25 percent VAT could do it all: Pay for health-care reform, balance the federal budget and exempt millions of families from the income tax while slashing the top rate to 25 percent. A gallon of milk would jump from $3.69 to $4.61, and a $5,000 bathroom renovation would suddenly cost $6,250, but the nation’s debt would stabilize and everybody could see a doctor."

• Lawmakers to wade in deeper on energy, health care, MarketWatch.com (May 22, 2009) By Robert Schroeder.

  "The biggest of all is going to be how to pay for this," says Howard Gleckman, a senior researcher at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "There's no consensus." Members of the Senate Finance Committee are grappling with how to meet expected costs of $1 trillion over 10 years for a plan that would put in place nearly universal coverage."

• Obama’s Tax Proposal Won’t Create U.S. Jobs, GE, Microsoft Say, Bloomberg (May 21, 2009) By Ryan J. Donmoyer.

  "It’s sort of a red herring,” said Eric Toder, a fiscal policy expert at the Washington-based Urban Institute and a former Treasury tax official under President Bill Clinton. Toder said while Obama’s proposals will "close loopholes that erode the corporate tax base," they aren’t "going to have any effect on employment in the U.S."

• Editorial: Paying for Health Reform, The Washington Post (May 19, 2009).

  "Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center urged the panel to consider a value-added tax to pay for universal coverage. On a smaller scale, the excise tax on alcohol has not been raised since 1991; merely adjusting it for inflation would raise $5 billion annually."

• Different way to pay for health reform, The Washington Times (May 19, 2009) By Len Burman.

  "It might sound nuts to add a tax during a recession, but announcing a future VAT could help revive the economy. Suppose the administration announced that a 5 percent VAT would take effect in 2010 and rise to 10 percent in 2011. That would boost spending - and the economy - now and again in 2010, as people accelerate purchases, especially of such big-ticket items as cars and major appliances, to avoid the future tax increase."

• Congress has little appetite for health care taxes, Associated Press (May 19, 2009) By Stephen Ohlemacher.

  "So far, nothing tough has been done," said William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Institute, a Washington think tank whose research was often cited by Obama during the presidential campaign."

• Secondary Sources: Painful Deleveraging, California, Property, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (May 18, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog looks at California’s budget ballot initiatives. "Asking voters to approve propositions that temporarily increase revenues but limit future spending growth isn’t new — California has done it before with numerous initiatives and three special elections just since 2000."

• Healthcare overhaul emphasizes affordability, The Boston Globe (May 16, 2009) By Lisa Wangsness.

  "It's not rocket science to figure out how to bring in more revenue," said Len Burman, co-director of the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, who testified at the hearing. "But politically, it's very difficult."

• Washington expert to lead Laurier discussion on global economic recovery , ExchangeMagazine.com (May 15, 2009).

  "The keynote speakers will bring an international focus to the event. Gale is a renowned research economist employed by one of the top non-partisan think tanks in the United States. His areas of specialization include U.S. tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions and saving behaviour. He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. Gale has also served as a senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under former U.S. president George H.W. Bush."

• Healthcare overhaul emphasizes affordability, The Boston Globe (May 14, 2009) By Lisa Wangsness.

  "It's not rocket science to figure out how to bring in more revenue," said Len Burman, co-director of the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, who testified at the hearing. "But politically, it's very difficult."

• The Tiny Budget Cut That Wasn't, SeekingAlpha.com (May 13, 2009) By Kurt Brower .

  "Obviously, the bottom line is frightening," said Rudolph Penner, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "They have a long way to go to show fiscal restraint."

• How Is Obama Going to Pay for Health Reform?, The Huffington Post (May 13, 2009) By Howard Gleckman.

  "The numbers don't lie. The health reform plan President Obama laid out on the campaign stump would cost as much as $1.6 trillion over 10 years, according to my colleagues at the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. While no one knows what sort of reform Congress will cook up over the next months, it is a good bet the price will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. And even these days, that is still a lot of money."

• Closing Estate Tax Loopholes, Fox Business News (May 12, 2009) By John D. McKinnon.

  "A -- income has been taxed before ensemble that hasn't a lot of the incoming largest states is capital gains it has not been subject attacks. But this is the one time to get it you could taxes couple games ticket taxes and estate tax. As things stand right now about one half of all state one half of 1% of all states are subject of the estate tax at the very small fraction of those are very big estates that pay very large amounts of tax."

• White House Unveils Tax-Rate Details, The Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2009).

  "Rosanne Altshuler, the co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said the impact of the tax increase could be muted for many higher-income couples, and some might even see a tax cut. That is because the tax rate on some of their taxable income -- between about $209,000 and $230,000 currently -- would fall under the Obama proposal from 33% to 28%."

• Shift from Spending to Saving May Be Downturn’s Lasting Impact, The New York Times (May 12, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "If Americans cut back, as they almost have to do, what will replace that source of demand?" asked William G. Gale, director of the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist policy research group. "The easy answer is the Chinese consumer," he said, but unlike their more prodigal American counterparts, the Chinese save about a quarter of what they earn. "We may cut back faster than they expand into that space, so there might be a lull."

• President Obama Seeking Tax Cut for the Well-to-Do?, ABCNews.com, Political Punch blog (May 12, 2009).

  "Bob Williams of the Tax Policy Center notes that President Obama is proposing raising the highest two tax rates -- but he's also proposing that the threshold levels for one of those rates be raised."

• Obama's 'A list' tax plans, CNNMoney.com (May 11, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  ""They're putting in enough provisions to get to the revenue gains they originally estimated," said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center."

• Shift to Thrift: How Will Americans Save? , The New York Times – Economix Blog (May 11, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "People are probably going to be thinking more along the lines of ‘How do I generate safe and secure retirement income?’ instead of ‘How do I amass the biggest balance in my account?’" said William Gale, director of both the economic studies program at Brookings Institution and the Retirement Security Project. Workers can invest their retirement savings in (among other things) stock funds, bond funds and annuities, and Mr. Gale expects there to be much more interest in the latter two categories."

• Editorial: Offshore tax code needs dose of reform, The Virginian-Pilot (May 9, 2009).

  "Some skepticism about the plan comes from unlikely quarters, including the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. Critics worry the change could lead to the loss of U.S.-based jobs that support foreign subsidiaries and also encourage the sale of the subsidiaries to foreign companies."

• Critics unimpressed by Obama's proposed budget cuts, Kansas City Star  (May 7, 2009) By David Lightman.

  "The president doesn't seem to want to touch the real problem" of health care and Social Security spending, said Rudolph Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office director who's now a senior fellow at Washington's Urban Institute."

• Obama's Budget Knife Yields Modest Trims, The Washington Post (May 7, 2009) By Lori Montgomery and Amy Goldstein.

  "Obviously, the bottom line is frightening," said Rudolph Penner, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "They have a long way to go to show fiscal restraint."

• Obama vs. Outsourcing, BusinessWeek, Eye on Asia blog (May 6, 2009) By Mehul Srivastava.

  "Instead, says Rosanne Altshuler, a co-director of the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Policy Center, this change to deferrals policy might just encourage companies to merge with foreign multinationals, or move their headquarters overseas so that they fall under a different country’s territorial tax system. "This takes the former U.S. MNC’s foreign income out of the reach of the U.S. Treasury," she says. "I don’t see how the change will increase jobs at home."

• Business groups gear up to fight Obama tax crackdown, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 6, 2009) By Bob Keefe.

  "Roseanne Altshuler, co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said Obama’s proposal probably wouldn’t be as damaging as some critics suggest. Companies would still be able to take advantage of some foreign tax credits, for instance, that could reduce their tax burden. But she acknowledged it could prompt some companies to reconsider if they want to be based in the United States because of higher tax rates."

• Will Obama tax plan really save jobs?, CNNMoney.com (May 6, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "For instance, companies go abroad primarily to sell products abroad, said Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Tax Policy Center. In 2006, she noted, only 10.5% of sales of U.S. controlled foreign subsidiaries were sent back to the United States."

• Secondary Sources: Central Banks, Global Finance, Home Buyer Tax Credit, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (May 6, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "Bob Williams writes about the usefulness of home buyer tax credits on the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog. “Led by Missouri, at least eleven states have created ways to help buyers cover down payments or closing costs by advancing the credit. Participating states offer qualifying homebuyers low- or no-interest loans — typically as second mortgages due when buyers receive their tax credits."

• Obama Targets Overseas Tax Dodge, The Washington Post (May 5, 2009) By Lori Montgomery and Scott Wilson.

  "Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said some of Obama's proposals have merit. But "the big question mark is whether limiting deferral will lead to more jobs in the U.S., and it's not clear to me that this is what will happen." Instead, Altshuler said, the result may be to create a tax advantage for U.S. firms to be acquired by foreign owners, an "unintended consequence" that "would probably be bad."

• Business criticizes Obama's tax plan, Reuters (May 5, 2009) By Kim Dixon.

  "You always have to worry about unintended consequences," said Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. One possible impact could be an increase in U.S. companies purchased by foreign companies to escape the new tax changes, she said."

• Tax Reform Handcuffs, National Journal Experts Blog (May 4, 2009) By William Gale.

  "Tax reform involves improving the efficiency, equity, simplicity, and revenue adequacy of the tax system. Any effort to establish adequate revenue is going to require an increase in revenues – most likely through the creation of a new tax like a VAT."

• Battle Begins as Tax Plans Issued, CQ Today (May 4, 2009) By Richard Rubin.

  "This use of the "check-the-box" rule is fairly common, as indicated by how many corporations use subsidiaries in low-tax countries such as Ireland to structure their overseas operations, said Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Brookings/Urban Institute Tax Policy Center."

• Obama targets tax havens, and corporate America shudders, Christian Science Monitor (May 4, 2009) By Peter Grier.

  "Tightening loopholes for individual tax evaders and adding resources for international enforcement would be good moves, according to Rosanne Altshuler, codirector of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution."

• Editorial: Estate Tax Politics, Bangor Daily News (May 4, 2009).

  "Nationally, only 100 small businesses and farm estates would owe any estate tax at all in 2011 if the 2009 rules are extended, according to the Brookings Institution-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center. It says the biggest winners under the Lincoln-Kyl amendment would be the very wealthy, and it would cost the budget $91 billion more than the Obama proposal."

• Obama tax breaks may trip up seniors, The Washington Times (May 3, 2009) By Donald Lambro.

  "No, it's not well-known. I have seen no publicity to tell people drawing Social Security that they are not eligible for both the Social Security payment and the Making Work Pay tax credit," said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in the Urban Institute and a former tax analyst for the Congressional Budget Office."

• For Powerball winner, no skipping on the check, The Washington Examiner (May 3, 2009) By Michael Neibauer.

  "Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the D.C.-based Tax Policy Center, said the first step for the winner’s lawyer, "of course," was to explore how to avoid paying taxes on the money. "I think that’s exactly what the attorney would be doing and that’s what they’d expect him to do," said Altshuler, also a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. "I’m not sure exactly how it would be done, but there’s a lot to be gained in getting them out of town."

April

• After 100 Days, Grading Obama's Stimulus Gamble, US News & World Report (April 27, 2009) By Amanda Ruggeri.

  "The Obama administration is trying to manage a very difficult balancing act between trying to create jobs quickly while still picking projects carefully enough to avoid waste. "We're losing perspective about how much is actually getting accomplished," says Bill Gale, the director of the Brookings Institution's economic studies program. "The stimulus is one of the biggest things the government has ever done, and it was out the door in four weeks."

• Congress working to change estate tax, San Francisco Chronicle (April 26, 2009) By Kathleen Pender.

  "If that happens, the vast majority of people won't have to worry about estate tax, says Roberton Williams a senior fellow with the Tax Policy Center. The center estimates that if the 2009 estate tax is made permanent, only 6,410 - or one-quarter of 1 percent - of all estates will be subject to tax in 2011."

• Bush Is the Wrong Role Model, The Washington Post, White House Watch blog (April 23, 2009) By Dan Froomkin.

  "The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for,' said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. 'The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy."

• Tax the heirs of the rich (at least of few of them), The Christian Science Monitor (April 22, 2009) By David R. Francis.

  "Under that regime, an estimated 15,400 executors would need to file returns, according to a study by Mr. Burman and two other experts for the Tax Policy Center. And heirs of only 6,200 multimillionaires would have to pay any estate tax at all. Because of the basic exemption, charitable giving, and other exemptions, the effective average tax rate on an estate would be much lower than the marginal 45 percent. Only about 550 small-business owners or farmers faced the estate-tax burden last year."

• First 100 Days: Obama's Federal Spending Spree Raises Management Concerns, FOX News (April 23, 2009) By Stephen Clark.

  "You take any organization in the world and you double its size in 90 days, it's going to have a hard time managing that transition," said William Gale, vice president and director of the economic studies program at Brookings Institute."

• The Real Runaway Entitlements, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brainstorm blog (April 20, 2009) By Teresa Ghilarducci.

  "Eric Toder at the Urban Institute calculated that the richest 20 percent of taxpayers get 66 percent of the benefits for home-mortgage interest deductions, 76 percent of the benefits for 401(k) plans and 35 percent of the benefits for employer health-care expenditures."

• Tax fairness: Good luck with that, CNNMoney.com (April 20, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "It's an unprincipled and inconsistent jumble of ideas. It doesn't make the system simpler," said William Gale, vice president of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. Gale and others would prefer a loophole-free tax system that has lower overall income tax rates that apply to a broader base of people. "The more we get away from that the more the system feels arbitrary," Gale said."

• Despite Major Plans, Obama Taking Softer Stands, The New York Times (April 19, 2009) By David M Herszenhorn and Jackie Calmes.

  "The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for," said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. "The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy."

• On estate tax, Senate stages its own death scene , The Oregonian (April 17, 2009) By David Sarasohn.

  "Except, of course, they aren't. The Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center has found that possibly 100 small businesses in the entire country would top the $7 million range, and possibly none in Arkansas. In fact, at $7 million, the tax would exclude 99.7 percent of dying Americans."

• Americans' Tax Burden Near Historic Low, The Washington Post (April 16, 2009) By Lori Montgomery.

  "According to the most recent IRS statistics, about 45 million households -- a third of all filers -- owed no federal income tax after taking their credits and deductions in 2006. This year, with the profusion of new credits in the stimulus package, about 65 million households -- or 43 percent of all filers -- are likely to owe no income taxes, according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution."

• Economic insight and analysis from The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (April 15, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, will answer questions online about how the Obama Administration should revamp the tax code."

• Who pays taxes - and how much?, CNNMoney.com (April 15, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "Next year, as a result of all those tax cuts, filers making more than $1 million will enjoy a 7.7% average boost in their after-tax income relative to what they would have if the tax cuts weren't in place, according to the Tax Policy Center. Middle-income households, by comparison, will see an average boost of 2.6%."

• Realigning the Tax Code: Promises, Promises , CQ Politics (April 15, 2009) By Adriel Bettelheim.

  "Len Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, says some of Obama's tax proposals would actually gum up the tax code, by limiting itemized deductions for high-income filers while adding new credits and deductions for individuals at the bottom of the income scale. Burman sees eerie parallels with 1960s efforts to deny the wealthy a way to legally avoid taxes that resulted in the Alternative Minimum Tax, a perennial source of Excedrin moments for Congress and presidential administrations ever since."

• Five Things To Do Today , Time Out Chicago, The TOC Blog (April 15, 2009) By John Dugan.

  "I dug online long enough to find a treasure trove of tax facts and figures from the Urban Institute and Brookings’ Tax Policy Institute."

• Congress Bails Out the Superrich, The Big Money (April 15, 2009) By Charles Wallace.

  "Supporters of the legislation claim that the estate tax was an unfair burden on thousands of small businesses and farms. But the facts are quite different. According to the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the number of estates affected by the tax in 2009 will fall to just 6,200 [3]. Close to half of the tax is paid by the richest 0.1 percent of Americans. According to the IRS, there were just 2,909 estates greater than $10 million [3] in 2007."

• The Income Tax System is Broken, CBS News (April 15, 2009) By Declan McCullagh.

  "Those numbers come from an analysis published yesterday by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Neither is a low-tax or conservative advocacy group; the Urban Institute was created under the Johnson administration during the Great Society era, and it receives most of its funding from the federal government."

• A Small Business-Estate Tax Myth?, Kiplinger.com (April 15, 2009) By Joan Pryde.

  "But is that really true? A new analysis from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center indicates otherwise. Using data from the IRS on the number of estate taxpayers and returns filed by state for 2007, this analysis projects that under current law there would be 6,160 taxable estates in 2011, when the exemption amount drops to $1 million. Out of that total, roughly 100 would be small businesses, though the tax policy center says that number could go as high as 150, depending on what happens to asset values in the next two years. And of course, it would be fewer if the exemption goes to $3.5 million."

• Rethinking Your 401(k) Plan, SmartMoney (April 14, 2009) By Reshma Kapadia.

  "Even the most vocal proponents agree with some of the concerns. The possible mistakes in setting the right default for annuity products can cause more havoc than picking the wrong level of savings for automatic enrollment, says William Gale, director of the Retirement Security Project and vice president at the Brookings Institute. To get over these not-so-small hurdles, Gale proposes a three-pronged strategy."

• Troubled economy? Tax credits to the rescue, The Christian Science Monitor (April 14, 2009) By Mark Trumbull.

  "Yet the tax refunds this year "are pretty high," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. And "more than two-thirds of people get a tax refund…. The real question is what people will do with it."

• On the deficit, talk is cheap, The Washington Times (April 14, 2009) By Robert Greenstein.

  "Some in Congress, however, propose to further shrink or eliminate the tax, claiming it has a harsh impact on small businesses and farms. This argument is nonsense - the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center has found that, under the 2009 rules, only 100 small business and farm estates in the entire nation would owe any estate tax in 2011. All the others will be exempt."

• Obama’s tax reckoning, The Hill (April 14, 2009) By Walter Alarkon and Ian Swanson.

  "In coming years, almost all households will receive hundreds of dollars in tax cuts under proposals highlighted in Obama’s first budget, but the top 0.1 percent of the population would see an average increased tax burden of $371,675, according to calculations by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Much of that revenue would pay for the tax cuts going to others."

• Senate to Uber-Rich: "Help Is on the Way", The Huffington Post (April 13, 2009) By Robert Greenstein.

  "Earlier this month, it voted 51 to 48 to add to its 2010 budget plan a proposal by Senators Blanche Lincoln and Jon Kyl to substantially weaken the estate tax. Only the wealthiest 1 of every 400 people who die -- the top one-quarter of 1 percent -- would benefit from this proposal, since they're the only ones who owe any estate tax under current rules, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center."

• Extreme Fundraising, Forbes (April 13, 2009) By Steven Bertoni.

  "Dinners work. But sympathy does, too, discovered economist Leonard Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. His blog recounting a vicious dog bite, searing heat and blown tires led friends to increase the donations they'd pledged for the 3,600-mile bike trip he took in 2005 with his son Paul, then 22. The duo raised $109,000 for Partners in Health, a charity that brings health care to the world's poor. Burman built his own Web site but relied on a for-profit tour company for trip logistics. "If I hadn't done it for charity, I wouldn't have enjoyed it," Burman says. "But it was amazing how excited people got. It was really one of the best experiences of my life." Still, the 55-year-old Burman, a self-described "bicycle freak," isn't planning another cross-country cycling adventure."

• A tax increase for the middle class? - A conservative expert says it’s necessary. A small-business scholar says it would be a big mistake. , The Sunday Paper (April 12, 2009) By Stephanie Ramage.

  "At the Washington-based Brookings Institution, a think tank seen as being to the left of the American Enterprise Institute, tax expert Ben Harris says he’s surprised that Viard is talking about taxing the middle class, but it’s plausible: The U.S. government has bills to pay. "When we look forward at the federal budget, entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—they explode over the next several decades," he says. And we can’t ignore those costs, because they contribute to our federal deficit, something else we can’t ignore. As the deficit grows, more American debt is bought up by foreign interests, and the rates charged on loans climb."

• Lawmaker: Independent advice may bolster 401(k) plans - Despite massive losses, the system isn't broken, says Rep. Andrews , Investment News (April 12, 2009) By Mark Bruno.

  "Typically, individuals have shied away from annuities in their 401(k) plans because they carry high fees — or they simply do not understand these types of products, noted William Gale, director of the Retirement Security Project at The Brookings Institution in Washington. "It's also not intuitive, because it's asking people to hand over all of this money that they've saved for years in exchange for a significantly smaller monthly payment," Mr. Gale said. "There's always been this all-or-nothing thought about annuities."

• Blanche and the estate tax , Arkansas Times, Arkansas Blog (April 12, 2009) By Max Brantley .

  "A new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that only 100 farms and small businesses in the entire country would be subject to the estate tax under Mr. Obama’s plan, a number that shrinks to 40 under the proposal Ms. Lincoln sponsored with Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. A subsequent analysis by the center raised the prospect that there may be no farms or small businesses in Arkansas vulnerable to the tax."

• Editorial: The Small-Business Myth, The Washington Post (April 12, 2009).

  "In fact, nearly all small-business and family-farm estates are already shielded from having to pay estate tax. If the estate tax were kept at its current level, as President Obama advocates, only 430 business or farm estates would owe any tax whatsoever in 2011, according to an estimate by the Brookings Institution-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center."

• Fate of Estate Tax Imperils Obama’s Ambitions, The New York Times (April 12, 2009) By Carl Hulse.

  "A new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that only 100 farms and small businesses in the entire country would be subject to the estate tax under Mr. Obama’s plan, a number that shrinks to 40 under the proposal Ms. Lincoln sponsored with Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. A subsequent analysis by the center raised the prospect that there may be no farms or small businesses in Arkansas vulnerable to the tax."

• Taxes could be far worse, The News & Observer (April 12, 2009) By Rob Christensen.

  "Tax burden is measured by economists as taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The United States had a tax burden that was 27.3 percent of the GDP in 2005, according to the liberal Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank financed by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute."

• Seniors: How Taxed Are They?, Miller Mc-Cune (April 11, 2009) By Robert B. Hudson.

  "The first federal "tax break" for elders came with the Social Security Act in 1935, when the decision was made not to tax Social Security benefits because, as recounted by Penner (a fellow with the Urban Institute), benefits were initially so low it wasn't worth the administrative cost to tax them. A special exemption for people over 65 was enacted as part of a Republican tax cut bill in 1948, passed over President Truman's veto."

• Tax Code Changes: Maybe Next Year, CQ Weekly (April 11, 2009) By CQ Staff.

  "Clearly, nobody’s going to be proposing tax increases right now because the economy is in a serious crisis, and even if everybody in the administration believes that fiscal restraint, cutting back on spending and increasing taxes, would be a good idea once the economy has recovered, it’s probably not a good idea to talk about that right now," said Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, at a recent forum of tax specialists."

• A Domestic Diplomatic Offensive, National Journal (April 11, 2009) By Ronald Brownstein.

  "The Tax Policy Center, a center-left think tank, estimates that over the next decade the GOP plan would have reduced federal revenues by $5 trillion or $6 trillion, more than double the cost of President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts combined. "It would be the biggest tax cut in history by far," says Len Burman, the center's director. Earlier this year, 36 of the 41 Senate Republicans voted for a similar plan that would have likewise slashed the top rate on the wealthiest taxpayers to 25 percent. The top rate has not been that low since 1931. When was the last time a party took inspiration from Herbert Hoover's era?"

• Editorial: Guarding the Family Fortune, The New York Times (April 8, 2009).

  "Of the tiny number of estates that are taxable, almost none are small businesses. A new analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that under 2009 law, only 100 small businesses and family farms would owe any estate tax in 2011. And almost all such estates are able to pay the tax bill without having to sell business assets, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. The Lincoln-Kyl tax cut would raise the estate-tax exemption to $10 million per couple ($5 million for singles) and, in an even bigger giveaway to the superrich, lower the top rate from 45 percent to 35 percent."

• Secondary Sources: Black Swans, Google, U.S. IOUs, Wall Street Napoleon, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (April 8, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "On the other side of the ledger, the federal government has future assets beyond those currently carried on the books — namely, the future tax revenues it will collect." Separately, Len Burman on the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog looks at proposals for altering the estate tax, breaking down the effects of several options."

• Drifting Right, Lincoln Comes Out Against EFCA, The Washington Post, 44 The Obama Presidency blog (April 6, 2009) By Alec MacGillis.

  "Opponents say that it would cost the Treasury $250 billion and would benefit only the very wealthiest families -- and precious few farmers and small businessmen. Already, the Tax Policy Center estimates, only the wealthiest three-tenths of a percent of estates will pay taxes under the 2009 rates, which President Obama has proposed to extend.."

• How Big Of A Small-Business Tax Hike?, U.S.News.com, Risky Business blog (April 6, 2009) By Matthew Bandyk.

  "For example, Karen Klein recently explained in Business Week that data from the Tax Policy Center show that only 8.9 percent of people reporting small-business income have household income over $250,000."

• Where taxes are headed, CNNMoney.com (April 3, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "The government doesn't want to subsidize U.S. companies to invest overseas," said tax policy expert Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute."

• Time For A Tax Reform, Forbes.com (April 3, 2009) By Bruce Bartlett.

  "Urban Institute economist Rosanne Altshuler, who was chief economist for the Bush tax reform commission, thinks Obama may have tied the hands of the task force too much by prohibiting any tax increase for those making under $250,000. Says Altshuler, "That means 95% of taxpayers can't pay additional tax, even if it would result in a more efficient system, decrease inequalities or make their lives much simpler. At a time of monster deficits, that pretty much rules out any sensible reforms."

• Fuzzy Picture of Taxes, Spending and Debt, The New York Times (April 2, 2009) by David M. Herszenhorn.

  "What they are talking about now is what happens after 2010," said Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute. "Do they make things in the stimulus bill permanent? Do they let the Bush tax cuts remain in place, and, if so, for how many people? No one is arguing to let the Bush tax cuts expire for everybody. The question is where do you draw the line."

• Editorial: GOP offers alternative to the Obama budget, The Washington Times (April 2, 2009).

  "These are humongous tax-cut numbers, big, scary numbers," said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center. Even if the Bush tax cuts are permanently extended and the alternative minimum tax is permanently "patched" so it snares no more taxpayers, the Republican tax plan would reduce revenues by an additional $3 trillion to $4 trillion, Mr. Burman said."

• How re-tread arguments thwart achieving a saner economy, Artvoice.com (April 2, 2009) By Bruce Fisher.

  "Then there’s research by Len Burman, who heads the joint Brookings Institution-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center. Burman’s research shows that over the last 50 years, real GDP growth has not varied in response to changes in capital gains tax rates."

• Why do the world's wealthiest favor the estate tax?, The Examiner (April 1, 2009) By Claire Moore.

  "According to the Tax Policy Center, fewer than 0.2 percent of all estates would be subject to the tax in 2009. Of that 0.2 percent of taxed estates, only about 1.3 percent are expected to be small business or farm estates."

• Opinion: A tax plan charities can support, St. Petersburg Times (April 1, 2009) By Joel Berg.

  "According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, the proposal would affect only 1.2 percent of U.S. households — those in the top two tax brackets. Nearly 99 percent of households would be unaffected. The plan would merely restore the deduction rate to Reagan-era levels."

• Opinion: With friends like these, Indianapolis Star (April 1, 2009) By Marie Cocco.

  "This year, the Tax Policy Center found, about two-thirds of this tax will be paid by about 700 estates. The inheritors of these estates represent 0.03 percent of all anticipated heirs in 2009."

• New Math for IRA Savings, SmartMoney Magazine (April 1, 2009) By Peter Keating.

  "Unfortunately, the long-term costs of permanently sheltering so many dollars from taxes will be huge—perhaps as much as $100 billion through 2049, according to the Tax Policy Center."

March

• Getting older but working longer , The News-Sentinel (March 30, 2009) by Jennifer L. Boen.

  "On the other hand, for the laid off or recently retired older worker, returning to the workforce may become more difficult. In January the nonpartisan economic and social policy researcher Urban Institute in Washington reported the unemployment rate for adults age 65 and older had reached a 31-year high of 5.1 percent. Those were individuals who were looking for work or who reported they had lost their job."

• Breaks are available - even if you're not itemizing, The Boston Globe (March 29, 2009) by Leonard Wiener.

  "It's a kind of double dipping," says Roberton Williams, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. In theory, the standard deduction - for example, $10,900 in 2008 for a couple filing jointly, $5,450 for a single, and $13,000 for a couple 65 or older - should cover the typical deductions to which most people are entitled, he says. But now, "you can get the benefit of the standard deduction and then the benefit of these other ones as well."

• Democrats, GOP duel over small business taxes, The Associated Press (March 28, 2009) by Stephen Ohlemacher.

  "His numbers are consistent with a widely cited analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a collaboration of two liberal-leaning think tanks, the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. According to the analysis, only 1.9 percent of taxpayers who report business income on their individual returns fall into the top two income tax brackets."

• Secondary Sources: Taxpayer Robbery, Corporate Taxes, Geithner Notes, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (March 25, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "Obama and Corporate Taxes: On the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog, Howard Gleckman looks at President Obama’s comments about corporate taxes. “The other day, President Obama told the Business Roundtable that he’d like to lower the corporate tax rate "in exchange for closing a lot of the loopholes that make the tax system so complex." And so inefficient, he might have added."

• Editorial: Taxing The Samaritan, Investor’s Business Daily (March 25, 2009).

  "It's not going to cripple them," Obama said. "They'll still be well-to-do." But it might very well well cripple charitable giving despite his reassurances. The Tax Policy Center, a liberal think tank, estimates the Obama plan will reduce annual giving by 2%, or $9 billion. That's $90 billion over 10 years."

• Editorial: Giving and Taxes, The New York Times (March 20, 2009).

  "The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, estimated that in 2011, when the changes would be due to take effect, only 1.8 million taxpayers 1.2 percent of the total would have their deductions reduced. Just 1.9 percent of taxpayers with income from a small business earn enough to be affected by the limits."

• Obama's budget targets wealthy for tax boosts, The Ithaca Journal (March 20, 2009) By Brian Tumulty.

  "During last year's presidential campaign, Obama promised to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. According to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank, Obama's budget plan largely delivers on that promise. The organization estimates that 91 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut under the plan."

• 10 Things the IRS Won't Tell You, SmartMoney (March 20, 2009) By Jason Kephart.

  "The Band-Aid in this year’s stimulus plan reduces the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT to 4.4 million it would’ve been 30 million, according to the Tax Policy Center."

• Would Obama tax plan discourage giving?, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 19, 2009) By Bill Lambrecht.

  "The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington has estimated that Obama's tax changes could reduce charitable giving by 2 percent or $9 billion by 2011. "That is not insignificant," the center said this month, "although it is somewhat ironic that conservatives have only now discovered the virtues of high tax rates in boosting charitable contributions."

• Tax rates at home, abroad pose challenges for U.S. manufacturers, ModernMetals.com (March 18, 2009) By Lisa Rummler.

  "In addition to labor costs, transportation, accessibility to local markets and other non-tax factors, what's also important are things like depreciation allowances, investment tax credits, tax holidays, the ability to undertake a lot of tax avoidance and tax planning--there are a lot of variables other than the corporate tax rate," she says. "But it's the case that the corporate tax rate is high, and a lot of other countries have been lowering their rates recently."

• Tax rates at home, abroad pose challenges for U.S. manufacturers, ModernMetals.com (March 18, 2009) By Lisa Rummler.

  "In addition to labor costs, transportation, accessibility to local markets and other non-tax factors, what's also important are things like depreciation allowances, investment tax credits, tax holidays, the ability to undertake a lot of tax avoidance and tax planning--there are a lot of variables other than the corporate tax rate," she says. "But it's the case that the corporate tax rate is high, and a lot of other countries have been lowering their rates recently."

• Taking a cut, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (March 18, 2009) By Bill Toland.

  "First-time home buyers get the biggest bonus of all, up to $8,000 in "free money," Mr. Williams said. The new home buyer's credit replaces the old one -- which was $7,500, and had to be repaid over time -- with one that doesn't have to be repaid as long as the buyer stays in the home for three or more years."

• Group Forecasts Tax Bills Under Obama's Proposal, Wall Street Journal (March 17, 2009) By John D. McKinnon.

  "The findings by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank, could give ammunition to congressional critics, including some Democrats, who worry about the potential economic and political impacts of raising taxes while the country is in recession. Mr. Obama's tax proposals must be passed by Congress before taking effect."

• Common Sense: Do the Rich Really Deserve Such a Bad Rap?, Smartmoney.com (March 17, 2009) By James B. Stewart.

  "The top 1% of earners are expected to pay 25% of all personal income taxes this year, and the top 5% to pay 40%, according to Tax Policy Center's latest figures. It's no wonder that the people I know who earn $200,000 to $300,000 are incredulous to be branded as “rich.” They certainly don’t feel that way."

• Treasury Department will dock AIG for executive bonuses, The Kansas City Star (March 17, 2009) By Dave Helling.

  "In general this is not good tax policy," Altshuler said. "What you’re asking the tax system to do is say bonuses are going to be taxed at a different rate than wage income — and only bonuses paid at specific companies."

• Your money: Washington's solution, CNNMoney.com (March 16, 2009) By David Goldman.

  "Roughly 97% of U.S. households could see tax savings as a result of the stimulus plan, with average savings totaling $1,179, according to the Tax Policy Center. But how much a household actually gets depends on income, marital status and whether a filer has children. The savings range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand."

• Stimulus may hit home, car and credit, Yahoo! Finance  (March 16, 2009) By Steve Hargreaves.

  "We've never, ever tried to sell this much debt before," said Rudy Penner, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "I hope there's someone willing to buy it."

• More stimulus needed? Possibly, CNNMoney.com (March 13, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "The provision would provide virtually no economic stimulus. Because the patch is perennially extended, it would have no effect on behavior in 2009," the Tax Policy Center concluded. "Almost 80% of the benefits would go to the richest 20% of households, who would be least likely to spend the additional funds and generate demand."

• Abyss could deepen again, The Washington Times (March 12, 2009) By Donald Lambro.

  "Republicans and some Democrats have also begun to question the "too big to fail" strategy that the administration refuses to abandon. "We should have a much more aggressive strategy" toward bad banks, "recognizing that they are broken and selling them off," said Brookings economic analyst Bill Gale. "Alan Greenspan said nothing is too big to fail. In some cases there is no reason to keep them in play."

• Treasury Secretary Says Economy Most Important to Charitable Giving, The Chronicle of Philanthropy (March 12, 2009) By Suzanne Perry.

  "The president has proposed limiting tax breaks for itemized deductions for families making more than $250,000 in 2011 as a way to raise money to help reshape the country’s health-care system. In questioning Mr. Geithner, Senator Graham referred to a study by the Tax Policy Center showing the proposal, in conjunction with a plan to raise the top income-tax brackets, could depress annual giving by $9-billion in 2011."

• Obama plan hits blue states hardest, The Politico (March 11, 2009) By Josh Gerstein.

  "The political dynamics of all this are super interesting," said Kim Rueben, a researcher at the Tax Policy Institute. "The places that would benefit monetarily are those that oppose it, and the places that would be spending more money to shift revenues to other places generally would support it."

• Obama a socialist? Not quite, The Boston Globe (March 11, 2009) By Scot Lehigh.

  "For upper-income taxpayers, marginal tax rates on ordinary income would return to Clinton-era levels," says Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "Taxes on capital gains would be lower or the same as the top capital gains rate under Ronald Reagan, while taxes on dividends would be significantly lower than under Reagan."

• NY Weighs Tax Increase on Business Owners, Inc.com (March 11, 2009) Eliot Caroom.

  "The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, studied the issue during the presidential campaign. They found that only about 3 percent of taxpayers who are likely filing returns for small businesses make over $250,000 a year."

• Editorial: The Charity Revolt, The Wall Street Journal (March 10, 2009) By Eliot Caroom.

  "A back of the envelope calculation by the Tax Policy Center, a left-of-center think tank, estimates the Obama plan will reduce annual giving by 2%, or some $9 billion."

• In Obama Tax Plan, A Shift of Wealth From the Top Down, The Washington Post (March 7, 2009) By Lori Montgomery.

  "Democrats counter that most small-business owners, whose profits flow through to their personal income taxes, do not fall in the top tax brackets. Overall, fewer than 2 percent do, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution."

• Obama tax plan could cost charities $9 billion, The Jewish Journal, The God blog (March 6, 2009) By Brad A. Greenberg.

  "Tax Policy Center, a program of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, explains: The proposal would cut deductions for taxpayers in the top two tax brackets starting in 2011, when the top rates will be 36 and 39.6. About 1.2 percent of households would be affected in 2011."

• Obama hosts Brown to compose G20 song sheet, China Daily (March 6, 2009) By Cai Hong.

  "Obama needs to convince the American people he is looking after their needs first and once he has done that, he can turn to things like international co-operation and open markets," William Gale, economics expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, was quoted as saying."

• Barack Obama's budget: Wishful, and dangerous, thinking, The Economist (March 5, 2009).

  "Finally, by asking only the richest 2% of Americans to pay more, Mr Obama is building his vision of a more activist government on a shaky foundation. Mr Bush's tax cuts raised the proportion of American families that pay no federal income tax (or are net recipients of tax credits) from 33% to 38%; Mr Obama’s will raise it to 44%, according to the Tax Policy Centre, a research group. Although many of these people do pay payroll taxes, Mr Obama is also intent on reducing the link between payroll taxes and the pension and health-care benefits they were supposedly designed to pay for. It certainly makes sense to keep poor people off the income-tax rolls, but removing a sizeable chunk of the middle class weakens the political bond between taxpayer and government, and will lead to pressure for more such spending."

• Stimulus gives students financial boost, Bankrate.com (March 4, 2009) by Christina Couch.

  "A study by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C., found that one out of every three tax credit-eligible students misses out on tax savings simply by not applying."

• Smaller breaks for wealthy? Try again, CNNMoney.com (March 4, 2009) by Jeanne Sahadi.

  "Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, estimates that the provision would reduce annual giving by 2% -- worth about $9 billion in 2006, the latest year for which charitable giving data are available."

• Tax-Deduction Proposal Would Cause Giving to Drop by 1.3%, Study Finds, The Chronicle of Philanthropy (March 3, 2009) by Suzanne Perry.

  "The center said an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, found that the proposal would affect only 1.2 percent of U.S. households, those in the 33-percent and 35-percent tax brackets. To counter that, "Health reform will greatly reduce the burden on nonprofit organizations to provide free health care, thereby offsetting to a significant extent the overall drop in contributions,' the center said."

• Talking Points Lite, The Washington Independent (March 3, 2009) by Jefferson Morley.

  "Actually, Obama’s proposed changes to upper-bracket tax deductions wouldn’t affect charitable giving much, according to a new analysis of data from the Tax Policy Center data by Paul Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities."

• India: Worries Grow About Obama Outsourcing Policies, BusinessWeek (March 3, 2009) by Mehul Srivastava.

  "The estimates for tax revenues generated by that budget change start at $15 billion in 2009 and go up to $25 billion in 2012. Those inexact estimates, says Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of two Washington think tanks, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution), is an indication that the changes in tax policy have not yet been worked out, and likely will not become public until April."

• Charitable donations provision in reserve fund scrutinized, Modern Healthcare (March 3, 2009) by Matthew DoBias.

  "But an analysis by the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution said that the proposal would affect about 1.2% of U.S. households and would reduce charitable contributions by 1.3%—less than what some had predicted."

• The Stunted Economic Stimulus, Newsweek (March 2, 2009) by Robert Samuelson.

  "Worse, the economic impact of the stimulus is already smaller than advertised. The package includes an obscure tax provision: a "patch" for the alternative minimum tax (AMT). This protects many middle-class Americans against higher taxes and, on paper, adds $85 billion of "stimulus" in 2009 and 2010. One problem: "It's not stimulus," says Len Burman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "(Congress was) going to do it anyway. They do it every year." Strip out the AMT patch, and the stimulus drops to about $700 billion, with almost 30 percent spent after 2010."

• Managing a stimulus windfall, CNNMoney.com (March 2, 2009) by Steve Hargreaves.

  "The federal, state and local bureaucracy just doesn't have the capacity to handle that decision making," said Rudy Penner, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "There's going to be a lot of waste."

• A primer on the stimulus package, The Buffalo News (March 2, 2009) by David Robinson.

  "The tax cuts included in the stimulus plan will reduce the tax burden on 97 percent of American families, according to estimates from the Tax Policy Center, a Washington, D. C., think tank."

• The audacity of borrowing (Obama budget edition), Foreign Policy (March 1, 2009) by Phil Levy.

  "So what is scaring the bond traders? Perhaps they spent last weekend reading a timely report by the distinguished economists Alan Auerbach (UC-Berkeley) and Bill Gale (Brookings). The upshot is that the United States has serious long-term fiscal challenges, between the downturn, an aging population, and major entitlement programs. None of the options for getting out of the mess looked particularly palatable. And that was before the president spoke of an extra trillion dollars for health care."

February

• As Task Force Debuts, Some Ask: Who Is Middle Class?, The Washington Post (February 28, 2009) by Alec MacGillis.

  "But the economic emergency and Obama's political strength have given him an opening to extend tax relief much further up the ladder than was possible for Clinton, who campaigned on a middle-class tax cut but was able to pass only an expansion of the earned-income tax credit for the working poor. Households in the $66,000 to $112,000 income range will see their taxes drop by $1,300 on average, according to the Tax Policy Center."

• Critics question president’s pursuit of overseas tax breaks, Houston Chronicle (February 28, 2009) by Dan Freedman.

  "It’s not clear that changing the tax code will help keep jobs in U.S.," said Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the nonpartisan Washington-based Tax Policy Center. "And it’s not clear that by investing abroad, U.S. multinationals are hurting the U.S. economy."

• Obama's budget: Taxing for fairness or class warfare?, Los Angeles Times (February 28, 2009) by Maura Reynolds.

  "What this does is undo the Bush tax cuts. And then it focuses a lot of new things at the middle and the bottom to reverse the inequalities," said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center."

• Obama’s blizzard of big-spending proposals snowing under economic hope, The Kansas City Star (February 28, 2009) by E. Thomas McClanahan.

  "A recent paper by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center paints a grim picture of the government’s future financial position. "In 2009, the federal deficit will be larger as a share of the economy than at any time since World War II,” write the authors, Alan Auerbach and William Gale. "What is more troubling is that, under what we view as optimistic assumptions, the deficit is projected to average at least $1 trillion per year for the 10 years after 2009, even if the economy returns to full employment and the stimulus package is allowed to expire in two years."

• Crisis Gives Obama a Chance to Make Long-Term Electoral Gains, Bloomberg (February 27, 2009) by Matthew Benjamin.

  "Bush’s argument was that they’re the engines of prosperity, they’ll invest and create jobs, and prosperity will trickle down," said Roberton Williams, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. Median income for U.S. households fell to $50,233 in 2007 from $50,557 seven years earlier, adjusted for inflation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau."

• It's a Mad World, The Wall Street Journal (February 27, 2009).

  "Last year the Tax Policy Center run jointly by the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution examined the likely effects of Obama's plans to raise taxes on couples making over $250,000."

• Mortgage Deduction Looks Less Sacred, The Wall Street Journal (February 27, 2009) by Nick Timiraos.

  "Nearly 80% of the benefits from mortgage-interest and property-tax deductions go to the top 20% of taxpayers in terms of income, according to Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, while only 3.5% of the benefits go to people in the bottom 60% of income earners. Most lower- and middle-income homeowners don't qualify for the deductions because they don't itemize deductions on their tax returns. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama proposed a 10% mortgage-interest tax credit for homeowners who don't itemize."

• A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas, The New York Times (February 27, 2009) by David Leonhardt.

  "The tax code will become more progressive, with relatively higher rates on the rich and relatively lower rates on the middle class and poor," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. "This is reversing the effects of the Bush policies," he added, and then going even further."

• President Barack Obama's pledge to cut deficit in half a huge challenge, Chicago Tribune (February 26, 2009) by Janet Hook and Peter Nicholas.

  "I don't see how he can do it," said William Gale, a tax policy expert at the Brookings Institution whose own analysis has found that even with the most optimistic assumptions, he would expect the deficit to be $850 billion in 2013. He believes that it is almost surely an underestimate because his calculations assume the economy will not worsen and another stimulus bill will not be needed."

• Obama's budget: Back to brass tacks, CNNMoney.com (February 26, 2009) by Jeanne Sahadi.

  "The Tax Policy Center estimates that making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent for everyone would result in a $1.7 trillion loss in revenue over 10 years. Letting the tax cuts expire for only high-income filers could reduce that loss to $949 billion."

• Obama's deficit promise won't be easy to keep, Christian Science Monitor (February 24, 2009) by Peter Grier.

  "Adjusting for likely economic events and policy interactions, the 10-year deficit may be $10.2 trillion, or 5.5 percent of GDP, according to projections by economists William Gale of the Brookings Institution in Washington and Alan Auerbach of the University of California, Berkeley. Beyond that, the gap continues as far as the eye can see. Mr. Gale and Mr. Auerbach judge that current policy, if it continues, produces a permanent gap between revenue and expenditures of 4 to 9 percent of GDP."

• FACTBOX-Budget, tax ideas put to Obama team, Reuters (February 24, 2009) by Steve Holland, Donna Smith and Caren Bohan.

  "Yale University law professor Michael Graetz and Brookings Institution economics experts William Gale were among those who said a VAT tax is needed given that the traditional tax system is not providing sufficient revenues."

• Nation faces enormous fiscal obstacles, The Washington Times (February 24, 2009) by David M. Dickson.

  "This is no longer a theoretical exercise. In a recent paper examining the fiscal crisis in 2009 and beyond, two economists - Alan Auerbach of the University of California at Berkeley, and William Gale of the Brookings Institution - detected "a clearly discernable uptick in the perceived likelihood of default on five-year U.S. Treasury debt, a notion that was virtually unthinkable in the past."

• Health Care Tops Fiscal Need List; Medical Costs Threaten the Nation With Bankruptcy, White House Says at Summit, The Washington Post (February 24, 2009) by Lori Montgomery and Amy Goldstein.

  "To me, the overriding news of the day is we have a president who says there is a fiscal crisis and the buck stops here," said William G. Gale, a tax expert at the Brookings Institution."

• Bar Tabs May Climb as U.S. States Consider Raising Booze Taxes, Bloomberg (February 23, 2009) by Andrew Cleary.

  "State taxes may not be the only threat. President Barack Obama might be tempted to raise federal levies to offset the aftermath of his $787 billion economic-stimulus bill, though observers such as Robertson Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center think tank in Washington, say it’s unlikely. "Any federal increase that singled out alcohol producers would only depress demand and would not be consistent with trying to revive the economy," while being "trivial" in terms of plugging the budget hole, he said."

• Obama pledges to cut nation's deficit in half, CNN Money.com (February 23, 2009).

  "And according to estimates by economists Alan Auerbach of the University of California at Berkeley and William Gale of the Brookings Institution, the deficit - largely because of the recession and the new economic stimulus effort - will average at least $1 trillion per year for the next 10 years, even if the stimulus is limited to two years and the jobs picture improves dramatically."

• Obama's deficit goals count on rosy assumptions, The Associated Press (February 23, 2009) by Jim Kuhnhenn.

  "So the question is really can they do that (reduce the deficit) as well as implement the agenda that he was elected on," said William Gale, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution."

• Can Obama Actually Achieve Entitlement Reform?, Time (February 23, 2009) by Michael Scherer.

  "In practice, this will mean giving uninsured Americans good news, while at the same time telling patients, and health providers, that bad medicine is on the horizon. "Someone is going to have to tell people you are not going to get the care you want," explains Howard Gleckman, a research associate at the Urban Institute. "Covering the uninsured is easy compared to that."

• Obama Has Much to Juggle in Coming Week, The Wall Street Journal (February 22, 2009) By Jonathan Weisman.

  "With the federal deficit heading toward $2 trillion, the emphasis all week will be on addressing the nation's fiscal problems over the long haul. Economists Alan Auerbach of the University of California, Berkeley, and William Gale of the Brookings Institution released a paper last week predicting annual trillion-dollar deficits over the next decade -- in their optimistic scenario."

• Editorial : Fiscal Reality; The spotlight moves from short-term stimulus to long-term debt., The Washington Post (February 22, 2009).

  "A paper by the Brookings Institution's Alan J. Auerbach and William G. Gale depicts the new reality: not just deficits as far as the eye can see but trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. They find that even under optimistic assumptions, including having the economy return to full employment and letting stimulus spending expire in two years, deficits will range between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion, in current dollars, for the next decade. This is, as Mr. Auerbach and Mr. Gale conclude, "an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem."

• Details of state, federal tax changes, San Francisco Chronicle (February 22, 2009) by Kathleen Pender.

  "The broadest tax break: Most workers will get a federal tax credit equal to 6.2 percent of wages up to $400 per person in 2009 and again in 2010. Couples can get up to $800 each year, even if only one spouse works, says Roberton Williams, senior fellow with the Tax Policy Center."

• Economic stimulus plan: What's in it for you, The Arizona Republic (February 22, 2009) by Ronald J. Hansen.

  "This could mean a cash refund for some businesses that were doing well until recently, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center."

• Stimulus plan will touch broad range of Alabama taxpayers, The Birmingham News (February 21, 2009) by Mary Orndorff.

  "Previously, its benefits increased with each child up to two, but the stimulus law now allows increases for three or more children. According to the Tax Policy Center, an independent tax policy research group, the maximum credit for families with three or more children would increase from $5,028 to $5,657."

• Events Designed To Prepare Nation For Budget Plan, Washington Post (February 20, 2009) by Lori Montgomery.

  "In a report released yesterday by the Brookings Institution, authors Alan Auerbach and William Gale predicted that, even under optimistic assumptions, the deficit will "average at least $1 trillion per year for the 10 years after 2009, even if the economy returns to full employment and the stimulus package is allowed to expire in two years."

• What Rick Santelli Means for Obamanomics, USNews.com,Capital Commerce Blog (February 20, 2009) by James Pethokoukis.

  "As a new paper from the Tax Policy Center notes, the price of purchasing insurance against default on 5-year senior U.S. Treasury debt rose from around 10 basis points before September 2008 to above 70 basis points in early 2009. What are bond investors so worried about? Maybe they see the same fiscal future, trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, as do report authors Alan Auerbach and William Gale."

• Events Designed To Prepare Nation For Budget Plan, The Washington Post (February 20, 2009) by Lori Montgomery.

  "In a report released yesterday by the Brookings Institution, authors Alan Auerbach and William Gale predicted that, even under optimistic assumptions, the deficit will "average at least $1 trillion per year for the 10 years after 2009, even if the economy returns to full employment and the stimulus package is allowed to expire in two years."

• Stimulus Goodies for (Nearly) All, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (February 19, 2009).

  "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — will cut taxes for 97% of all households in 2009, raising their after-tax income by an average of 2%, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute."

• Summit to tackle ballooning US deficit, Financial Times (February 19, 2009) by Edward Luce.

  "Mr Obama will host a bipartisan summit on fiscal discipline next Monday that will aim to address America’s long-term struggle to control entitlement costs in healthcare and social security. For most economists, it cannot come a moment too soon. "We are now looking at fiscal deficits of over a trillion [a million million] dollars every year for the next decade," says William Gale of the Brookings Institution. "And that is without adding all the trillions of dollars in contingent liabilities of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, which show up nowhere in the budget or national debt numbers."

• Republicans, Democrats Revert to Form, Part of the Static Face of Change in Washington, U.S. News & World Report website (February 18, 2009) by Robert Schlesinger.

  "First, when Reagan took office, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center. By the time he left office, it was 28 percent. It's now 35 percent. Even if you buy the supply-side argument, the current rate is hardly a confiscatory impediment to wealth seekers. But for conservatives, taxes are seemingly by definition too high merely by the fact of their existence. Their tax-cutting glee has become disconnected from economic realities."

• Stimulus tax cuts’ true cost: $1.7 trillion, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mound City Money blog (February 18, 2009) by David Nicklaus.

  "You’ve read repeatedly that the fiscal stimulus law contains about $500 billion of federal spending and a little less than $300 billion of tax cuts. Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center figures, though, that the tax cuts may end up costing more than the stimulus spending. The issue, he says, is that Congress performed its usual sleight-of-hand by making the tax cuts temporary."

• As Obama Signs $787 Billion Stimulus, the Question Is, Will it Work?, USNews.com (February 17, 2009) by Katherine Skiba.

  "At the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, economist William Gale said the best hope is that the stimulus will mitigate or cushion the severity of the current downturn. While not a trivial thing, it's unrealistic to expect a complete halt to the slide. "Compared to not doing anything, the stimulus has got to help," he says, "because if we don't do anything, we're going to be in this downward, self-reinforcing spiral." He warns, however, that it will take time to work. "We're not going to stop the economy from getting worse in the short run."

• What's in the Stimulus for You, The Wall Street Journal (February 17, 2009) by Arden Dale, Victoria E. Knight, and Jililan Mincer.

  "Many taxpayers will get the Making Work Pay credit, though it isn't open to anyone who earns more than $95,000 ($190,000 for couples). Its slow-drip approach is likely to stimulate spending, according to some tax experts. In hard times, people tend to stash a larger windfall in a savings account, says Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. An extra $20 each week, however, is more likely to get spent at the movies or on a piece of clothing."

• As Obama Signs $787 Billion Stimulus, the Question Is, Will it Work?, USNews.com (February 17, 2009) by Katherine Skiba.

  "At the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, economist William Gale said the best hope is that the stimulus will mitigate or cushion the severity of the current downturn. While not a trivial thing, it's unrealistic to expect a complete halt to the slide. "Compared to not doing anything, the stimulus has got to help," he says, "because if we don't do anything, we're going to be in this downward, self-reinforcing spiral." He warns, however, that it will take time to work. "We're not going to stop the economy from getting worse in the short run."

• Will You Feel the Benefit of the Stimulus Package? Find Out Here, Advertising Age (February 16, 2009) by Bradley Johnson and Ira Teinowitz.

  "The score: A small boost. The Tax Policy Center said: "Any increase in demand is highly uncertain ... given the precarious state of the economy and many households' finances."

• Bill's tax cuts underwhelm analysts, McClatchy Newspapers (February 15, 2009) by Donald Lambro.

  "When the Tax Policy Center graded 17 key tax-cut provisions in President Obama's economic-stimulus bill last week, 10 received a C or D grade and none merited an A. The tax-policy analysis group, sponsored jointly by the liberal Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, said its scores were an attempt to evaluate whether the bill's tax credits and other tax incentives will boost the economy and deliver the biggest bang for the buck."

• Don't blame me, I voted for Ron Paul Part II, The Star-Ledger (February 14, 2009) by Paul Mulshine.

  "And just a few months ago they were backing a man who was promising to put the budget another $4.2 trillion out of balance over the next decade. That was the Independent Tax Policy Center's estimate of McCain's tax-cut impact on the budget deficit."

• It's done: Congress sends $787 billion stimulus to Obama, The Idaho Statesman (February 13, 2009) by David Lightman.

  "The Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two respected center-left policy research organizations, agrees."

• The Economic Stimulus bill: Give us your comments, McClatchy Newspapers (February 13, 2009).

  "The Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two respected Washington think tanks, maintain a joint Tax Policy Center. It has analyzed the tax provisions of the massive economic stimulus bill that’s expected to be signed into law next week and given them grades, as on a report card, on the basis of how well each measure would boost the economy in the short run, per dollar of budget cost."

• Some states would benefit more from stimulus, MSNBC.com (February 13, 2009) By Tom Curry.

  "As the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution reports, "Since the AMT disallows the state and local tax deduction, residents in high-tax states are more likely to pay the tax."

• The stimulus' tax benefits, San Francisco Chronicle (February 13, 2009) By Tom Abate.

  "Bottom line: Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington, says the $400-per-person tax credit will have the most stimulative effect because people are likely to spend the money without noticing."

• How the Stimulus Helps You Pay for College, U.S.News.com (February 13, 2009) By Kim Clark.

  "What Obama originally proposed would have had a much more direct effect," although delivering the payments to schools each fall might have been a logistical nightmare, says Kim Rueben, a tax expert at the Urban Institute. Her group gave the education tax credit stimulus proposal a C because of the small, delayed payments."

• The Right's Real Fear: People Will Like the Spending , The New Republic, The Treatment blog (February 12, 2009) By Harold Pollack.

  "Tax cuts tilted to the wealthy and (unspecified) spending restrains on social programs were the centerpiece of Senator McCain’s economic plan. Projecting out to 2019, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calculated that Senator McCain’s program added about $1.3 trillion more to the federal deficit than did the competing Obama plan."

• Sorting Through The Economic Stimulus Breaks, The Wall Street Journal (February 12, 2009) By Arden Dale and Jilian Mincer.

  "Indeed, "taxpayers should wait and see what's in the final bill," said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute."

• Political Wisdom: Is Post-Partisanship Doomed?, The Wall Street Journal, Capital Journal blog (February 12, 2009) By Sara Murray.

  "As the Huffington Post has reported, the Congressional Budget Office and Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center have both described the AMT as a poor use of federal dollars."

• Stimulus bill marked by political gesturing, Financial Times (February 12, 2009) By Alan Beattie.

  "I feel better already," joked Bill Gale, director of economic studies at Brookings, the leading Washington think-tank, on the news that Congress was reaching compromise on a package of tax cuts and spending to stimulate the US economy."

• Despite stimulus, no quick turn for jobs, economy, Associated Press (February 12, 2009) By Jeannine Aversa.

  "The stimulus package is not going to turn the economy around right now," said William Gale, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "The best-case scenario is that it mitigates the depth and the severity of the downturn. That's not a bad thing. It's just not the magic bullet that fixes everything."

• Measure will bring relief, but not a windfall, to Ariz., The Arizona Republic (February 12, 2009) By Ronald J. Hansen.

  "Arizona has relatively few affected by the AMT. Less than 2 percent of Arizona taxpayers paid the AMT in 2004, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution."

• Senate OKs stimulus bill, Courier Post (February 11, 2009) By Raju Chebium and Brian Tumulty.

  "Len Berman of the nonpartisan Urban Institute said putting the AMT patch in the bill "makes no sense," because it does not create jobs. Besides, he said, "People who are hit by the AMT, most of them have relatively high income." Congress could have passed the patch later in the year instead of sticking it in a bill aimed primarily at job creation, Berman told reporters during a conference call."

• Stimulus's Winners and Losers, The Wall Street Journal (February 10, 2009) By Patrick Yoest.

  "Senate Democrats, such as Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) said the provision isn't narrowly tailored enough to stimulate new-home construction. Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, agrees. "The other people who making out like bandits are people who would have bought houses anyway," Mr. Williams said."

• Something for everyone, sort of, MarketWatch (February 10, 2009) By Ruth Mantell & Andrea Coombes.

  "Most money directed at lower-income families is spent, but money going to higher income families is mostly saved," said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution in Washington. "The Senate cut back one of the most effective provisions in the House bill, the child tax credit, and they funneled over $100 billion into provisions that are likely to do little or no good," such as the credits for people who buy homes or cars. Read more on the tax breaks in the bills."

• Trolling for tax breaks, MarketWatch (February 10, 2009) By Andrea Coombes & Chuck Jaffe.

  "The House's version, which targets the provision to lower-income taxpayers, is a good way to stimulate the economy, said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution in Washington. "If you give $2,000 to someone earning $13,000, they pretty much have to spend it because they're living on the edge. If they're earning $100,000 they're more likely to bank the money," he said."

• $15,000 for homebuyers, CNNMoney.com (February 10, 2009) By Les Christie.

  "The Tax Policy Center gave the credit a mediocre C+ grade in its Tax Stimulus Report Card. TPC spokesman Bob Williams agrees that the credit is poorly targeted and does nothing to address the issue that's holding most buyers back: suspicion that prices will keep falling. "As long as people are uncertain about what markets are going to do, this won't help much," he said. "It's not enough to change that."

• More Jobs in House Bill Than Senate’s, Economists Say (Update1), Bloomberg (February 10, 2009) By Matthew Benjamin.

  "The Tax Policy Center in Washington gives it a D-minus grade for stimulative effect. It is "neither timely nor targeted," and "makes no sense as economic stimulus," according to a recent report from the TPC, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution."

• Changes, Up and Down the Ladder, The New York Times (February 8, 2009) By Edmund L. Andrews.

  "According to the Tax Policy Center, people near the bottom, with incomes of $10,000 to $20,000, would see their after-tax incomes rise by an average of 7.1 percent, or $1,019. For people earning $50,000 to $75,000, after-tax incomes would rise 6 percent, or an average of $1,201. Surprisingly, after-tax income would edge upward even for many people with incomes of $200,000 to $500,000."

• Stimulus: Spreading the wealth through the year, Omaha World-Herald (February 8, 2009) By Henry J. Cordes.

  "At that rate, it doesn't look like enough to be worth saving," said Roberton Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C. "So people will go to an extra movie, have a dinner out or buy some clothes. They'll spend it."

• Senate’s Tax Credit Favors Higher-Income Homebuyers (Update1), Bloomberg (February 7, 2009) By Ryan J. Donmoyer.

  "Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, said the new housing credit would stabilize housing prices, though he questioned whether such intervention is necessary. "This is saying we’re going to put a floor underneath how far housing prices are going to fall," Williams said. "It may well induce a lot of people to buy houses who otherwise might not have," he said."

• The Gang System, The New York Times (February 6, 2009) By David Brooks.

  "Infrastructure reformers noted the bill mostly funds 1950s-style projects. Researchers from the Tax Policy Center graded each of the measure’s tax provisions for effectiveness. They gave out zero A’s, six B’s, seven C’s and two D’s. The measure earned a 2.26 G.P.A., not exactly the kind of report card you’re proud to take home to momma."

• Budget bumps under stimulus plan a blessing, curse, The Denver Post (February 5, 2009) By Michael Riley.

  "I think the whole thing has a very high probability of turning into a fiasco similar to the Katrina rescue effort," said Rudolph Penner, an economist at the Urban Institute in Washington. "It could be a management nightmare."

• Lessons of Depression up for fresh discussion, Las Vegas Sun (February 5, 2009) By Megan McCloskey.

  "William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution, said the judgment of Hoover’s actions doesn’t come down to a matter of "too much or too little; it was the wrong thing. It’s not a matter of do you intervene or not intervene. It’s whether you do something intelligent or not."

• Secondary Sources: Bad Bank Criticism, Fed and Stocks, Tax Cheats, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (February 4, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "On the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog, Howard Gleckman uses the tax troubles of Obama cabinet nominees to argue that the tax code is too complicated. "In truth, if most of us had our returns picked over this way, we too would be fingered as tax scofflaws, or perhaps as suckers who paid more than we owed. Sure, some of us would be cheating. But many of us would be victims of an insanely complex law we cannot possibly understand. Either way, there is something very wrong with a Code that is so complicated that it encourages both confusion and cheating. And, sadly, Congress and Obama seem poised to make it even more complex."

• Some Breaks for Business Raise Concerns, The Wall Street Journal (February 4, 2009) By John D. McKinnon.

  ""At some point, this whole process got ugly on the spending side in the House," said William Gale, a tax expert at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank based in Washington. "Now it's getting ugly on the tax side in the Senate."

• Green Ink: Stalled Stimulus and Clean-Energy Blues, The Wall Street Journal, Environmental Capital blog (February 4, 2009) By Keith Johnson.

  "For what it’s worth, the Urban Institute does a side-by-side comparison of the House and Senate versions of the stimulus, grading each on how much bang it gets for a few hundred billion bucks."

• What Is Real Stimulus And What Isn't?, Time (February 3, 2009) By Michael Grunwald.

  ". Similarly, as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center pointed out, the Senate's $70 billion patch to the alternative minimum tax is "neither timely nor targeted," and "makes no sense as economic stimulus." And it's worth noting that the corporate tax cuts favored by the GOP critics who have screeched the loudest about the lack of stimulus in the stimulus happen to be lousy stimulus. But the biggest measure — a $145 billion payroll tax cut — is both good stimulus, because it targets low- and moderate-income earners who are more likely to spend it, and good policy, because it aims to start rebuilding the middle class and help ordinary families shafted by eight years of trickle-down tax policy."

• Which stimulus is better: tax cuts or spending?, The Christian Science Monitor (February 3, 2009) By Peter Grier.

  "On the other hand, the Making Work Pay credit is small, about $10 a week for the average taxpayer, and thus might be more likely to be spent, according to an analysis of the stimulus plan tax cuts by the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center. As to the credit’s stimulative effect, the Tax Policy Center analysis gives it a B-plus."

• 'Stimulus' Tax Cuts Not Set Up For Speedy Economic Impact, Investor’s Business Daily (February 3, 2009) By Jed Graham.

  "You can't go negative on your withholding (except with the earned income tax credit)," explained Roberton Williams, a researcher at the Tax Policy Center."

• Stimulus bills get barely passing grades, Chicago Tribune, The Swamp blog (February 2, 2009) By Frank James.

  "Anyone looking for useful information on the House and Senate economic stimulus bills to answer the all-important question: will they actually work to jump-start the economy? should refer to the Tax Policy Center's "Tax Stimulus Report Cards." The Tax Policy Center is a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute and offers some of the best non-partisan analysis in Washington."

• Senate starts to tinker with $900 billion stimulus plan, Miami Herald  (February 2, 2009) By David Lightman and Margaret Talev.

  "However, the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center found little to praise in the tax part of the Senate plan. It didn't give any tax provision a grade of A, which it awards for measures that would "begin quickly and go primarily to people who would most likely spend it or to businesses that would most likely use funds to retain workers or expand." It gave B-pluses to the rebates of $500 to most taxpayers, and to an expansion of the child credit."

• Unclear if stimulus tax breaks will save jobs, spark spending, Kansas City Star (February 2, 2009) By Kevin G. Hall.

  "The trick from the tax side is putting money in people's pockets in ways that they spend it. How do you get people to do something they otherwise wouldn't do if you just gave them money?" said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture between the Urban Institute and The Brookings Institution, two center-left research organizations in Washington."

• Despite shortcomings, stimulus called a must, San Francisco Chronicle (February 1, 2009) By Carolyn Lochhead.

  "Foreigners could suddenly dump U.S. debt and the dollar. Former Congressional Budget Office chief Robert Reischauer warned recently that the financial crisis is a "wake-up call" for how suddenly and ferociously events can shift if foreigners decide they cannot or will not double or triple their lending to the United States."

January

• Growth Confusion, Forbes.com (January 30, 2009) By Bruce Bartlett.

  "There are also tax cuts contained in the stimulus package. Although these will have an impact on the economy more quickly than increased spending, they are poorly designed for stimulative purposes. The Tax Policy Center found that none of the provisions deserve a grade of A, even with a rather generous grading standard. Overall, the tax cuts get a grade of C+ in terms of stimulus. Economist Steve Entin says they aren't justified as supply-side measures, either."

• News Analysis: Components of Stimulus Vary in Speed and Efficiency, The New York Times (January 29, 2009) By David M. Herszenhorn.

  "Mr. Obama’s signature tax cut would provide a credit of up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for couples. It won praise in an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, because it could be carried out quickly, by reducing the amount of money withheld from paychecks."

• Come get your Obama money!, Los Angeles Times, Opinion L.A. blog (January 29, 2009) By Jon Healey.

  "I was doing some research on the Web today for an editorial about the economy when I recalled something a Brookings Institute scholar told me a couple of weeks ago. The Tax Policy Center -- a joint effort by Brookings and the Urban Institute -- was putting together a report card on the tax provisions of the economic stimulus proposal moving through Congress."

• Homebuyers get a bonus in the stimulus bill, CNNMoney.com (January 29, 2009) By Les Christie.

  "But the credit has its drawbacks, according to Bob Williams, a spokesman for the Tax Policy Center, which gave it a mediocre C+ grade in its Tax Stimulus Report Card. Williams points out that buyers should beware that they won't actually receive any refund for a home purchased this year until after they file their 2009 income taxes in April 2010."

• Bam's stimulus bill: All-out effort to pry open your wallet, New York Daily News (January 29, 2009) By David Saltonstall.

  "So says economist William Gale, who likens President Obama's stimulus bill to a giant gamble aimed at turning today's vicious cycle of job cuts and gloom into a "virtuous" cycle of job creation and confidence. "What you need is a package that gets people to think, 'This is big enough to work,'" said Gale. "Then people will start to spend again, businesses will start to hire again and the vicious cycle will become a virtuous cycle."

• Is Greed still our Creed in America?, The Huffington Post (January 28, 2009) By Bill Donius.

  "There is a great divide that has been created in this country between the super rich and everyone else. I'm not sure the super rich or also the super greedy? The richest 1% of Americans earned $1.3 trillion in 2004, an amount greater than the total national income of Canada. Further the top 1% of Americans has 33% of the country's wealth. The tax policy center estimates that 80% of the tax savings from the Bush tax cuts went to the top 10% of taxpayers and almost 20% went to the top one tenth of 1%! Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank in his very insightful book, "Richistan", reported these figures."

• Stimulus Report Card: Is It the Right Fix?, ABC News, World News with Charles Gibson (January 28, 2009) By Betsy Stark.

  "I think it's very, very hard to get it exactly right," said economist Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center."

• Your tax savings - stimulus bill, CNNMoney.com (January 28, 2009) By Jeanne Sahadi.

  "Between those changes and the addition of the Make Work Pay credit, the Tax Policy Center calculates that a family of five making $16,200 a year (assuming each spouse makes $8,100) would get an additional $3,511 as a result of the stimulus bill. That same family would get an extra $1,651 if they made $32,000 a year."

• Secondary Sources: Stimulus, Stimulus and More Stimulus, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog (January 28, 2009) By Phil Izzo.

  "The Tax Policy Center has graded the tax provisions in the stimulus plan, and they some good and some bad. "aking Work Pay"tax credit, Grade: B+, Cost: $145.3 billion, Could start quickly. Payment in small increments may increase stimulus effect but two-year limit and high-income eligibility reduces impact… Incentives to hire unemployed veterans and disconnected youth, Grade: D, Cost: $0.2 billion, Based on past experience with this wage subsidy, it is unlikely to generate jobs for the target groups."

• Stimulus a case of haste makes waste?, Chicago Tribune, The Swamp blog (January 28, 2009) By Frank James.

  "Last year, the Tax Policy Center, a joint effort by the non-partisan Brookings Institute and Urban Institute published a useful web primer on what makes a good stimulus."

• What’s Missing in the Stimulus Plan, The New York Times, Room for Debate blog (January 28, 2009).

  "The $825 billion economic recovery package developed by President Obama and the Congressional Democrats includes new spending on education, health care, unemployment benefits and a vast array of public works projects to create jobs, with tax cuts making up just under 40 percent of the package. Much of the spending is on existing programs, and intended to speed money out the door. But does this huge plan represent all that’s needed? We asked this panel what’s missing."

• Republicans Question How Much Stimulus Plan Will Provide, The Wall Street Journal (January 27, 2009) By Naftali Bendavid.

  "The Tax Policy Center, a nonprofit Washington think tank, issued a report card Monday grading each of the package's 10 tax provisions on how well they would boost the economy in the short term. They rated two B-plus, with the rest falling short of that."

• Grading the Stimulus, The New York Times, Economix blog (January 27, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, has evaluated how stimulating the tax-related provisions in the bill are likely to be. In order to receive an A, "a provision would have to begin quickly and go primarily to people who would most likely spend it or to businesses that would most likely use funds to retain workers or expand." The analysts "do not consider the long-term effects on the economy."

• GOP, Dems gamble on effect of a stimulus bill, San Francisco Chronicle (January 27, 2009) By Carolyn Lochhead.

  "The Tax Policy Center, a joint effort of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, issued a report Monday that gives many of the tax cuts poor grades. The education tax credit for low-income families will be slow to start, it predicted, and the tax credit for first-time home buyers may give large windfalls to people who were already planning to buy. The business tax breaks fared even worse."

• Panel Offers Solutions to Financial Crisis, The Hoya (January 26, 2009) By Dawn Hu.

  "Gale stated that he was dubious about the practicality behind the standard approach of trying to stimulate individual consumption and increasing government spending, but that it still may be the best solution."

• CEDITORIAL: Pelosi's bash-the-rich falsehood, Washington Times (January 25, 2009).

  "When the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center ran the numbers, it found that the top five percent of taxpayers - those making $225,000 or more - received 30.5 percent of the benefits from the Bush tax cuts in 2008. But the other 95 percent of taxpayers got 70 percent."

• Obama Presses for Quick Jolt to the Economy , New York Times (January 24, 2009) By Jackie Calmes and David M. Herszenhorn.

  "Those "are not the right kinds of cuts," said Bob Williams of the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group. "You want to put money in the hands of people who will spend it." And the poorest Americans are “the only people we know will spend the money."

• Getting out of this hole will hurt, Financial Post (January 24, 2009) By Jacqueline Thorpe.

  "No matter what you do, if you lay more money on the line, whether it's through tax cuts or more spending, you're worsening the debt situation," said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. "Someday, the chickens come home to roost."

• Obama, Republicans seek common ground on economy, Los Angeles Times (January 24, 2009) By Maura Reynolds.

  "Roberton Williams, an economist with the Democratic-leaning Urban Institute and the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, noted that under the GOP proposal, rich people like Bill Gates would get the same tax cut as middle-income earners. And some of those on the lower end of the income scale would actually get less than taxpayers who earned more."

• Commentary: Obama's pledge too costly in a deep recession, McClatchy Washington Bureau (January 23, 2009) By Nina Owcharenko.

  "Coming on top of that, Obama's health bill would be crushing. The Lewin Group, an independent econometric modeling firm, and the Urban Institute/Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center estimate its price tag at $1.17 trillion and $1.6 trillion, respectively."

• Who Pays America's Highest Property Taxes?, Forbes.com (January 23, 2009) By Nina Owcharenko.

  "People are unhappy that their bills are increasing," says Kim Rueben, public finance economist at the Urban Institute. "Now that values are falling, they want their bills to fall."

• Experimental Stimulus, The New York Time's "Economix" blog (January 22, 2009) By Catherine Rampell.

  "Enter Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. He has come up with some creative ideas for stimulus proposals in the past (including the idea of a prepaid stimulus rebate card). His latest suggestion: experimentation."

• Here's $9.62. Go Save The Economy, Forbes.com (January 22, 2009) By Joshua Zumbrun.

  "If it's small enough that you don't really notice it, you're not likely to save it," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "But if you have $10 a week, will you say, 'Well, maybe I'll go to a movie'? We don't really know, because we haven't done this before."

• Your future may include more taxes, fewer benefits, Chicago Tribune (January 21, 2009) By Gail MarksJarvis.

  "Obama has not said precisely what he will do with Social Security or Medicare, and inflation seems distant. As the federal deficit balloons, however, William Gale of the Brookings Institution said the government will have to make cuts."

• Experiment to get best stimulus results, Marketplace (January 19, 2009) By Leonard Burman.

  "Len Burman: Here's a dirty secret about economic stimulus: We're making a lot of this stuff up. It's based on a combination of often inconsistent theory and ambiguous empirical evidence."

• Dems Dedicated To Death Tax, Forbes.com (January 19, 2009) By Ashlea Ebeling.

  "That's high enough that only one in 300 Americans dying this year will leave a federally taxable estate, compared with one in 43 in 1999, when the estate tax exemption was only $650,000, the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center projects."

• Forman: The death tax lives, The Journal Record (January 19, 2009) By Jon Forman.

  "According to the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, making 2009 law permanent – exempting $3.5 million and taxing the rest at 45 percent from now on – would cost over $100 billion between now and 2016, compared to current law with its $1 million exemption and 55-percent maximum rate starting in 2011."

• Experiment to get best stimulus results, Marketplace (January 19, 2009).

  "Lawmakers are still debating President-elect Obama's stimulus package and what will work best to boost our economy. Commentator Len Burman says "experimenting" by assigning different "treatments" to different states will help get the best results from the stimulus and maybe even help in the future."

• Get set for tax-law whiplash, MarketWatch (January 16, 2009) By Andrea Coombes.

  "We certainly can and should raise taxes on those people, but that's not going to be enough to close the budget gap," said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, in Washington. "There's no way we'll be able to solve our budget problems with spending cuts alone."

• How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, TIME magazine (January 15, 2009) By Michael Grunwald.

  "You can't let the safety net unravel just when people need it most," says Len Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "A lot of states have been terribly irresponsible, but this probably isn't the best time to teach them a lesson."

• How to Get Your Finances Ready for the Obama Era, SmartMoney.com (January 15, 2009) By Angie Marek.

  "Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center explains that unlike typical rebates, most of Obama’s credits are refundable, meaning families making too little to owe income taxes will get their credits in cash, "putting money in the hands of the folks who are the most likely to need to spend it." And research suggests that such credits do more than straightforward rebates to boost the economy."

• OUR COMMENTERS ARE ECONOMISTS., The American Prospect, Tapped blog (January 14, 2009) By Tim Fernholz.

  "However, employer wage subsidies are controversial among economists. Some of the debate among economists over employer wage subsidies has recently appeared at the Tax Policy Center’s blog, for example at http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/9/4051427.html."

• Durbin says 2010 is year of tax reckoning, The Hill (January 14, 2009) By Silla Brush.

  "Roberton Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that making tax cuts temporary makes it easier to eventually reduce the budget deficit. The problem, he said, is that "temporary" taxes are rarely ever temporary. "We know from history that temporary tax cuts just get renewed and renewed," Williams said."

• PolitiFact.com and the Obameter: We're tracking Obama's promises, St. Petersburg Times (January 14, 2009) By Robert Farley and Angie Drobnic Holan.

  "In some senses, the world has changed a lot," said Bob Williams of the Tax Policy Center. "When a lot of those promises were made, we were in a different situation than we are now. It would be wrong to go blindly forward without re-evaluating."

• How many new jobs? Your guess is as good as theirs, Politico (January 14, 2009) By Lisa Lerer and Victoria McGrane and Eamon Javers.

  "We’re making this stuff up," said Leonard Burman, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "We know the economy is in big trouble, and we know the standard prescription is to try and get money into the economy, but we don’t know the right amount."

• Is the Prospect of Economic Stimulus De-Stimulating?, SeekingAlpha.com (January 13, 2009) By Diane Lim Rogers.

  "John Irons (of the Economic Policy Institute) and I expressed similar doubts about that “new-jobs” business tax credit in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio last week (listen here), and Len Burman and Howard Gleckman have been testifying against it on the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog."

• Editorial: We think: Obama's plan to maintain the current estate-tax exemptions is responsible, Orlando Sentinel (January 13, 2009).

  "Advocates of repealing the tax altogether have claimed it wipes out small family farms and businesses by forcing heirs to sell them to pay what they owe the government. But only 140 of those estates worth less than $5 million would have to pay the tax in 2011 at the exemption level proposed by Mr. Obama, according to the independent Tax Policy Center. And the Congressional Budget Office has found that heirs of most small family farms and businesses owing the tax at the level he proposes would have the assets to pay it without selling the estate."

• Better options are needed to stop Juárez violence, El Paso Times (January 13, 2009) by Beto O'Rourke.

  "It's worth noting that in 2006 the U.S. collected a total of $5,360,997,000 in alcohol taxes and Texas collected $698,538,000 (numbers are from the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution)."

• Editorial: Bush's last press conference, The Minnesota Daily  (January 12, 2009).

  "On the Bush tax cuts—which disproportionately benefited upper class Americans—Bush stated he will "defend them after my presidency as the right course of action…I sided with the people on this issue." Ironically, those tax cuts, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, came as "government spending has increased significantly in all major categories: defense spending, domestic spending and entitlement spending."

• Special Emergency Edition: 2008 the Worst Year for Workers Since 1945; More Information on the Tax Cuts of Obama's Economic Stimulus Plan, CNN, Your Money (January 11, 2009) By Christine Romans, Ali Velshi, Jeanne Sahadi, Fredricka Whitfield, Allan Chernoff, Jennifer Westhoven.

  "Right now we need to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, but as soon as the economy turns around we're going to be facing a massive long-term budget shortfall that will have to be addressed at that point."

• CARSON CITY: In tough times, leaders get studious, Las Vegas Sun (January 11, 2009) By David McGrath Schwartz.

  "Others, such as the Urban Institute-Price Waterhouse Study in 1989, warned that Nevada would need to raise taxes to maintain services as its population grew."

• Political Economy: Rifle Shots Ahead, CQ WEEKLY (January 10, 2009) By John Cranford.

  "Last week, in a broad analysis of Obama’s tax proposals from the campaign, the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center was sharply critical at times of the president-elect’s stated intentions: “In general, the proposed changes would make the tax system more progressive but would further clutter the income tax with credits designed to promote specific social goals. And, unless accompanied by substantial reductions in spending, the tax cuts would substantially worsen the nation’s fiscal deficit,” the center said."

• Tax Cuts Receive New Emphasis—and Some Criticism—in Stimulus Debate, U.S. News and World Report (January 9, 2009) By Katherine Skiba.

  "Bill Gale, an economist who is codirector of the Tax Policy Center run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, said some of the tax measures "are just extremely poorly designed." He supports a spending infusion—not tax relief—saying it would yield a larger bang for every buck spent. "Businesses and households are going to be reluctant to spend out their full tax cuts," he said. "People have had their wits scared out of them—and are trying to retrench as fast as they can."

• The Obama Gap, The New York Times (January 9, 2009) By Paul Krugman.

  "But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: "lots of buck, not much bang."

• Obama's starting to take charge already, Philadelphia Daily News (January 9, 2009) By Will Bunch.

  "Howard Gleckman, of the Tax Policy Center, wrote on his blog yesterday that many of Obama's tax schemes, like credits for employers who hire new workers, would not be worth the money they cost. "Let's hope that many of these trial balloons crash to earth long before they have a chance to become law, though I fear they won't," he wrote."

• Projections make it harder to sell new president's package, Financial Times (January 8, 2009) By Krishna Guha and Edward Luce.

  ""If you take the less rosy but more realistic assumptions, we're looking at deficits of over a trillion dollars 10 years from now," says Leonard Burman, head of the Tax Policy Centre in Washington. "The problem is that anyone who raises concerns about the deficit in this environment is labelled a Herbert Hoover [the US president who cut spending during the Great Depression]. But these deficit numbers are genuinely alarming."

• Obama's fiscal plan, The Atlantic Online, Clive Crook’s blog (January 8, 2009) By Clive Crook.

  "Tax cuts aimed at the low paid (ie, payroll tax cuts) could be fast acting and would have a better demand multiplier than cuts in the income tax. They belong in the mix. The case for cuts in business taxes as a countercyclical measure is harder to make, though the Obama team is considering some, partly no doubt to win more Republican support for the plan in Congress. See Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center. Gleckman is no more impressed with the idea of refundable tax credits for creating new jobs, also floated by the Obama team."

• Congress Should Resolve to Simplify the Tax Code, The Washington Post (January 8, 2009) By Michelle Singletary.

  "The AMT, which is a separately figured tax, eliminates many deductions and credits, increasing the tax liability for an individual who would otherwise pay less. In 1970, the year after the AMT was enacted, only 20,000 filers were affected. But by 2010 more than 33 million -- a third of all taxpayers -- will be subject to the AMT, according to the Tax Policy Center."

• Lawmakers and Financial Experts Question Obama's Tax Cuts, The Washington Post (January 8, 2009) By Shailagh Murray.

  "It is tough to see how a company that is seeing its sales slaughtered in today's recession is going to hire just because it gets a few thousand dollars per new worker from the government," Howard Gleckman wrote on the TaxVox blog for the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. "Profitable firms would merely take the credit for bringing on workers they were already planning on hiring."

• Obama Shouldn't Cave to the Right on Tax Cuts, RealClearPolitics.com (January 8, 2009) By Marie Cocco.

  "Probably the least efficient way to stimulate the economy is with tax cuts, notably the impossibly inefficient break Obama wants to give businesses that create jobs or merely retain workers. There is no way to tell whether the company that "created" the job would have added a worker or kept one on the payroll. No one has found a way to statistically account for a cashier who leaves Wal-Mart for Target. No new job is created, but the new employer gets the tax break nonetheless. "It's a waste of money," says Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the Urban Institute and editor of its TaxVox blog on tax policy. "It's either a colossal waste of money or a little waste of money."

• Editorial: Obama modernizing his stimulus proposal, Press-Register (January 7, 2009).

  "William Gale, a tax policy analyst at the liberal Brookings Institution, told The Wall Street Journal that "it was hard to figure out how they were going to spend all that money in intelligent ways, so it makes sense to do more on the tax side."

• Deficits? That's the ticket, says President-elect Barack Obama, New York Daily News (January 7, 2009) By David Saltonstall.

  "We are on the edge of a very deep ravine, so I think it is right to go big here," said William Gale, co-director of the Washington-based Tax Policy Center. "Doing nothing would be a pretty certain way to push the economy right down the tubes."

• Obama eyes the familiar: tax cuts, Christian Science Monitor (January 6, 2009) By Ron Scherer.

  "We’re running these massive deficits, and we can’t afford $800 billion-plus in additional tax credits over the next 10 years," says Leonard Burman, director of the tax policy center at the Urban Institute in Washington. "On the one hand, a permanent cut is better than a temporary cut, although temporary tax cuts have a habit of becoming permanent anyway," he adds."

• Tax cuts in stimulus plan stimulate debate, United Press International (January 6, 2009).

  "The key way to think about this is from a political perspective rather than an economic perspective," Roberton Williams at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said."

• Banks, Homebuilders May Convert Losses Into Cash With Tax Break, Bloomberg (January 6, 2009) By Ryan J. Donmoyer.

  "Some tax experts, including New York University Professor Daniel Shaviro and Urban Institute scholar Eric Toder, a former Treasury Department official, have said they don’t see how a five-year-loss carryback will boost the economy. "I’m skeptical," Shaviro said in an interview last year."

• Scrutinizing The Obama Tax Plan, Nightly Business Report (January 6, 2009).

  "Len Burman, Director, Tax Policy Center: If the baseline is current employment and one company had just cut 50,000 jobs, but then adds 10,000 new jobs, do they get a credit, whereas the company across the street that struggled to keep the level of employment constant would get no subsidy? Does that make sense?."

• Obama Pitches Stimulus Plan, The Washington Post (January 6, 2009) By Paul Kane, Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray.

  "When somebody lays off 10,000 people but hires back 1,000, should they get a tax credit? That doesn't really seem fair," said Leonard Burman, a director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. "The problem with these things is defining what qualifies."

• Economists divided over cutting taxes, The Boston Globe (January 6, 2009) By Michael Kranish.

  "Roberton Williams, an analyst with the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said yesterday that Obama "has moved from the liberal side of the scale toward the conservative side by adopting the tax cut approach. . . . The key way to think about this is from a political perspective rather than an economic perspective."

• Obama pushing $300 billion in tax cuts to win stimulus backing, MarketWatch  (January 5, 2009) By Robert Schroeder.

  "William Gale, a budget and tax expert at the Brookings Institution, said pressure is on lawmakers and the incoming Obama administration to act on the stimulus."

• Q&A about Obama's economic plan, Minneapolis Star Tribune  (January 5, 2009).

  "A More than $100 billion in tax cuts would be given to businesses. One provision Obama is weighing is a one-year tax credit to companies that hire new workers or forgo laying off existing workers. Economists, however, think this provision would be difficult to implement and could have unintended consequences. "You could end up subsidizing growing industries and penalizing shrinking ones," said tax expert William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution."

• Time to Raise Gas Taxes? You Betcha!, Kiplinger.com, Washington Matters blog (January 4, 2009) By Mark Willen.

  "The aim of a gas tax isn't just to bring in revenue, though we sure need that. It's also to influence driving habits. As Howard Gleckman points out in his taxvox blog, when gas hit $4 a gallon, it got drivers' attention. They cut back sharply, taking fewer trips and relying more on public transit when they could. They also stopped buying gas guzzlers and tried to dump those they had, although few could find buyers for them. Now that gas is cheap again, the trend has reversed, and we're headed back to the driving levels of a year ago."