Clear nonpartisan analysis of fiscal and tax policy enables policymakers and the public to weigh competing theories on how to end the country’s economic crisis. Urban Institute researchers evaluated key components of the stimulus package and analyzed the tax proposals in the president’s budget. Warning decisionmakers about the unsustainable fiscal course ahead, our experts propose ways to control deficits and reform the entitlement programs that drive up spending. Read more.
Roberton Williams, Senior Fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, talks about how recent troop reductions in the Middle East, and war spending overall, impacts the nation's growing budget deficit. [video, 3:23 minutes]
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PACA) includes provisions that allow the purchasing of health insurance across state lines. However, these provisions are structured somewhat differently than earlier proposals. The differences are intended to provide states with more consumer protections from having those regulations undermined by cross state sales of insurance. The most important differences between the PPACA compact provisions and earlier interstate sales provisions are that the PPACA requires all states to comply with a minimum level of insurance regulation, and cross state sales would not be permitted in a state unless that state affirmatively joined a compact with one or more other states.
As the economy begins to recover from the Great Recession, policymakers must confront the next fiscal challenge: the long-run federal deficit. The first opportunity to do so is the impending expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts: full extension of all of the cuts would increase the deficit by $3.7 trillion over the next decade. The president proposes to cut that cost by allowing some of these tax cuts to expire on schedule. New estimates from the Tax Policy Center illustrate the tradeoffs between deficit reduction and the impact on taxpayers of letting specific tax cuts to expire.
Kids' Share 2010: Report on Federal Expenditures on Children through 2009, a fourth annual report, looks comprehensively at trends in federal spending and tax expenditures on children. This appendix details our data sources, the programs we include, and the methodology used to estimate the percentage of all expenditures that went to children.
This paper examines the economic impact of health reform. The conclusion is that health reform is not likely to have a significant effect on the US economy or on employment. The changes in both spending and taxes generally have offsetting effects and are simply too small relative to the overall size of the economy to have much of an impact. The taxes on insurers and drug companies will be more than offset by new revenues from increased coverage. State and local governments should be beneficiaries as well as most small businesses. The effects will also turn fairly positive to the extent that the cost-containment efforts are successful.
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