What time periods should we use in tax and other fiscal policy to evaluate people’s circumstances, and thus to determine either how they are being treated, or how they ought to be? This question is both fundamental and pervasive.Standard economic reasoning offers grounds for entirely basing...

The United States has a huge long-term fiscal gap, perhaps with a present value of around $74 trillion. By contrast, the explicit national debt of the U.S. is only around $6 trillion. The U.S. may thus be unable to continue meeting its current spending commitments without eventually enacting...