Peter Orszag, Director of the Office of Management and Budget for President Obama, responded Friday to critics of the administration’s proposal to reduce the amount of charitable contributions that high-income taxpayers can deduct. Many tax analysts, including this writer, argued that such a reduction would deplete much needed resources from charitable organizations and further undercut our civil society. Not to worry, writes Mr. Orszag. We wouldn’t do this in the midst of a recession, and it’s only fair that high-income and lower-income taxpayers enjoy about the same tax deduction for …
Here’s a test: Guess who made most of the charitable contributions in 2006, according to the most recent data available from the Internal Revenue Service? If you guessed “taxpayers with high incomes”, you’d win the prize. Now, guess which class of taxpayers the Obama administration wants to discourage from making charitable contributions. If you guessed “taxpayers with high incomes”, you just won again. The new Obama budget for Fiscal Year 2010 proposes that Congress reduce the tax deduction for charitable contributions by high income taxpayers. That worries many charities who …
Hardly any Washington policymaker is worrying about inflation right now. Who blames them? The economy continues to contract; prices are falling, not rising; and, President Barack Obama speaks about years, not months, before things are better. Inflation seems about as remote right now as, well, a good return on your stock investments. This inattention to future inflation is unfortunate: there are mounting signs that the big bugaboo of the 1970s might be ready for a return visit. No, I’m not seeing rising prices; but I am seeing the foundations of …
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Sound like, oh, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio or some other exasperated Republican stalwart lamenting proposals to spend our way out of the recession? Listen again: “I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.” Sound more like a liberal Democrat pushing job creation — say, Harlem’s …
In several recent speeches by Sarah Palin, she has cited an analysis of Barack Obama’s tax plan prepared by the Center for Data Analysis (CDA), a research division of The Heritage Foundation. I direct the CDA and posted the new analysis last week. We used a model of the U.S. economy that is widely employed for economic forecasting and policy analysis to estimate the economic effects of Obama’s and McCain’s tax plans. However, a minor controversy has erupted over the status of the CDA. The McCain-Palin campaign issued a press …
The Heritage Foundation recently published an evaluation of the candidates’ tax plans. This analysis assumed the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003 expired on schedule, or at the end of 2010, and that each tax plan reacted to what would be a very large tax increase if Congress and the president do nothing. Our paper finds that John McCain’s tax plan, which makes all of the tax reductions permanent (among other things), produces more than twice as much economic activity as Barack Obama’s plan, which makes those tax reductions permanent …
Far too often, the people who choose to serve in our military are characterized as being “poor” Americans who choose to serve because they have no other choice. The conventional wisdom among media elites is that that new military recruits disproportionately come from poor areas of the country, that minority race groups are overrepresented, or that new recruits are uneducated. This is just not true. Unfortunately, Judy Woodruff perpetuated this falsehood last night when she asked John McCain: Senator … The qualifications for joining the Army have been lowered today. …
