Bruce Bartlett

On May 29, London's Financial Times reported some startling news about the U.S. national debt. Instead of being about $3.5 trillion, as commonly understood, it was actually $44 trillion, according to a suppressed Treasury Department report by economists Kent Smetters...

This Friday, June 6, marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most important political/economic events in American history: Proposition 13. This initiative, which was approved by the voters of California on this date in 1978, sparked a "tax revolt" that spread...

In the early hours of May 23, the House and Senate both approved H.R. 2, a bill that reduces tax rates on wages, dividends and capital gains, among other things. The following day, before the legislation had even been signed into law, The New York Times pronounced it...

The Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times has engendered more commentary than any similar press scandal I can recall. Although in substance, the scandals involving Janet Cooke at The Washington Post, Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit at The New Republic, and Mike...

It is often said that the legislation process is like watching sausage being made: disgusting. What is left off this analogy, however, is that sausage can be very tasty. We have just seen a good example of tasty sausage being made in the tax area. Although the process...

The White House won a hollow victory in the Senate last week on its tax bill. The bill will do almost nothing for growth and could even be counterproductive, owing to harmful tax increases included in the package. In defense of the Senate, it was in an untenable...

The Bush administration is rapidly losing control of the tax legislative process. Its unwillingness to acknowledge that its plan needed to be totally rethought once a $350 billion revenue loss cap was imposed in the Senate has created an anarchic situation in...

President Bush's plan to eliminate the double taxation of corporate profits, by exempting dividends from taxation, appears to be on life support. Even before his tax package was reduced from $726 billion to $550 billion in the House and $350 billion in the Senate, the...

The Bush administration is understandably upset that its proposal for a $726 billion tax cut has effectively been watered down to $350 billion in the Senate and $550 billion in the House. However, this is less of a barrier to enactment of the administration's...

Dr. Robert Atkins died last week of complications from a fall on April 8. Famous for the high protein/low carbohydrate diet that he pioneered, overweight people the world over mourn his death. [1] For many, he was their savior, giving them a workable method for...

On March 25, the Congressional Budget Office released an important study of President Bush's budget proposal. What was novel about this study is that the CBO attempted to calculate the impact of the proposal on the economy as a whole. Normally, it assumes that even...

A little over a year ago, on March 5, 2002, President Bush made a serious mistake by imposing tariffs on imported steel. At the time, there were many, including myself, who said that the negative impact of this action on steel consumers would be much greater than any...

With many states now running large budget deficits, legislators are looking anew at higher cigarette taxes. Even though these taxes have been raised sharply in almost every state in recent years -- on top of price increases mandated by the tobacco settlement --...

One of the favorite liberal myths of the 1980s is that Ronald Reagan and his advisers played an elaborate trick on the American people. They got a huge tax cut passed in 1981 by convincing Congress, the press and the American people that it would lose no revenue....