Testimony

Eugene Steuerle testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on "Tax Reform Options: Incentives for Charitable Giving," presenting options on how to increase tax revenues with minimal impact or perhaps even an increase in charitable giving. Among other recommendations, he suggests a floor under charitable giving, improved compliance measures, greater restrictions on non-cash gifts, a better system of information reporting, allowing taxpayers to immediately deduct contributions they make while filing their tax returns, extending the deduction to taxpayers who don't itemize, raising the ceiling on allowed charitable giving for some types of gifts, and reforming the foundation excise tax.

Donald Marron's testimony before the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures and the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Committee on Ways and Means on energy policy and tax reform.

Rudolph Penner's testimony before the House Committee on the Budget on proposals for changing the budget process.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, Harry Holzer looks at unemployment and the labor market over the next several years.

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.

Gene Steuerle testifies on alternative ways to restore solvency and undertake benefit reforms in Social Security, concentrating on four: restricting automatic growth in benefits where needs are least, adjusting benefits so they both encourage employment and are concentrated more in older ages, removing many sources of inequity and inefficiency that penalize beneficiaries, and reforming private pensions so they better protect the majority of workers who today end up with little in the way of private retirement benefits.

In this testimony before members of the D.C. City Council, Peter Tatian, senior researcher in the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and director of NeighborhoodInfo DC, presents recent data showing that, although foreclosure activity has slowed in recent months, many D.C. homeowners are still having difficulty paying their mortgages, which puts them at risk of foreclosure down the road. These data suggest that the city should continue to take steps to protect homeowners, renters, and neighborhoods from the negative impacts of foreclosures.

Innovative practices - such as the Reclaiming Futures initiative, drug courts, and Project HOPE - can be used to better serve juveniles involved with the justice system and to improve public safety, the Urban Institute's John Roman told a committee of the District of Columbia's city council.

To understand better how youth in juvenile justice are doing under alternative policies and placements, improved access to data from all relevant agencies is needed, concluded Akiva Liberman at a hearing of a District of Columbia city council committee. Liberman is a senior adviser at the D.C. Crime Policy Institute.

Eric Toder's testimony before the before the Senate Finance Committee on how tax law complexity limits the effectiveness of tax incentives.