Institutional Reform / Change

The report discusses the important budget events of 2011. It begins with the House Republican budget and the president's response. The very different approaches to health and discretionary spending and tax policy are analyzed in detail. The policy debate continued into the confused debt limit negotiations of July. The Budget Control Act finally emerged. It capped discretionary spending and created a "super committee" that was to propose additional deficit reductions. The committee failed miserably. An automatic across-the-board spending cut is supposed to result from that failure. The report describes its effects on defense and nondefense spending.

This article was published as part of the Tax Note series "The Legacy of the TRA '86." As current budget pressure forces us to consider tax reform as a means of raising revenue, past reforms provide us some valuable lessons. Reforms typically begin with a consensus that something is broken and that while we disagree on the perfect solution, no one favors the unequal justice, inefficiency, or complexity in our tax code. It was that type of bipartisan agreement that led to past successful tax reforms, such as in 1986, 1969, and 1954. Similar ideas are relevant today.

Reprinted with permission from Tax Analysts

On July 27, 2011, Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer gave testimony to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee on how fiscal rules can restrain federal overspending.

Sweeping policy changes and scapegoating caseworkers after high-profile cases of child abuse are not the best ways to enhance the safety of young people, says child welfare expert Olivia Golden. Taking lessons from the airline industry and elsewhere, Golden lays out why clear-headed, evidence-driven examination of the resources, conditions, and communication that guide workplace decisionmaking should be the center of attention.

The congressional budget process has been so perverted that it no longer imposes much discipline on fiscal decision-making, comments Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. Penner explains how the situation arose and what to do about it.