A new Brookings Institution chart book by Jessica Riedl delivers a blunt warning for Washington: the federal budget problem is being driven by spending, not a lack of tax revenue. The charts show that even extremely aggressive tax hikes would fall far short of stabilizing the long-term budget, while higher tax rates on work, investment, and business would threaten growth and competitiveness. The Math Does Not Support a Tax-Hike-Only Strategy The most striking chart shows that

A new national poll released by the American Property Owners Alliance shows voters are ready for Congress to fix one of the most outdated parts of the tax code: the capital gains tax on home sales. The survey, conducted by OnMessage Public Strategies, found that 70% of voters oppose the current capital gains tax on home sales, including majorities across the political spectrum. The poll also found that 82% of Americans support adjusting the tax to account for inflation, with

Millions of Americans are paying taxes on gains they never chose to realize, and Congress has a clear opportunity to end this unfair treatment. The “Generating Retirement Ownership Through Long-Term Holding Act,” or “GROWTH Act,” H.R. 2089 and S. 1839, would fix one of the stranger features of the tax code by allowing mutual fund investors to defer taxes on reinvested capital gain distributions until they actually sell their shares. In a recent  op-ed in The Hill , CFE Presid

Massachusetts taxpayers just received a costly reminder of why welfare reform cannot stop at writing bigger checks. According to Massachusetts Daily News , a new Fiscal Alliance Foundation study found that Massachusetts paid out more than $1 billion in improper SNAP payments between 2022 and 2024 while as many as 75% of able-bodied recipients were not working. That scale of waste should concern anyone who wants the safety net to work for the people who truly need it. Food sta

Social Security was created in 1935 as a hedge against “poverty-ridden old age.” That mission is hard to square with the system Washington runs now. A couple claiming the maximum benefit at age 70 can receive about $124,000 a year in Social Security, even as younger and generally poorer workers keep paying payroll taxes into a program projected to hit insolvency in 2032. That is not a focused safety net. It is a sign that Social Security has drifted far from its original purp

Affordability keeps getting worse in many states for a simple reason: government spending has grown far faster than taxpayers’ ability to support it. Vance Ginn recently pointed to a clear benchmark for fiscal discipline, and the numbers make the case. From 2016 to 2025, aggregate state spending excluding federal transfers rose 65.8%, while the sustainable benchmark of population growth plus inflation rose just 32.4%. That gap helps explain why so many states keep talking ab

The first filing season under the Working Families Tax Cuts is already showing what certainty and tax relief look like in practice. Families and businesses no longer have to guess whether key parts of the tax code will vanish after one more election cycle. The law made major tax relief permanent, and now millions of Americans are seeing the results in their returns, refunds, deductions, and long-term planning. According to new Treasury Department data , the first tax season u

Tax season is when tax policy stops being abstract. Small business owners see it in what they owe, what they can deduct, and how much they can reinvest in the future. That made the recent podcast featuring CFE President Ryan Ellis and Brian Reardon of the S-Corporation Association especially timely, as the two discussed how the Working Families Tax Cuts improved the tax code for small and family-owned businesses. The conversation focused on the parts of the law that do the m

Tax Day is one of the most dreaded days of the year. This year, it also came with a reminder of what Congress prevented. If the family and business tax relief enacted in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had expired, American households would now be facing a broad and immediate tax increase. Instead, The Working Families Tax Cuts stopped what could have been one of the largest tax hikes in decades. What Congress Prevented Had that 2017 tax relief expired, taxpayers would have fa