On three occasions since mid-2011, the United States has come perilously close to exhausting its borrowing authority under a statutory limit commonly called the "debt ceiling." In prior work, the current authors argued that, in the event that the debt ceiling is reached, the President will face...

In this working paper, Resident Scholar Neil H. Buchanan statistically tests six alternative definitions of the federal budget deficit to determine if these definitions improve the results of econometric studies that use the deficit as an exogenous variable. Buchanan wishes to 1) evaluate how...

This article reviews several familiar plans to alter the structure of taxation, including the flat tax, a VAT, and the USA Tax. With the significant exception of a simplified income tax system, every plan to replace the current U.S. federal tax system would move us in precisely the wrong...

In response to increasing calls for policies to raise the U.S. saving rate, proposals are once again being offered in Congress to change the tax base from income to consumption. Beyond the important issues of income distribution (that is, outright unfairness) inherent in such a plan, it would...

The Social Security system has come under attack for having illegitimately transferred wealth from younger generations to the Baby Boom generation. This claim is incorrect, because it fails to understand how the system was altered in order to force the Baby Boomers to finance their own benefits...

This document gathers together 22 essays that were originally published as online commentary by Professor Neil H. Buchanan, between 2008 and 2012. All but one of the essays first appeared on the Dorf on Law blog. In these essays, Professor Buchanan discusses the arguments for and against...

Calls either to balance the federal budget on an annual basis, or to pay down all or part of the national debt, are based on little more than uninformed intuitions that there is something inherently bad about borrowing money. We should not only ignore calls to balance the budget or to pay down...

During the discussions at Professor Fineman’s recent feminist legal theory workshops, several participants argued that feminists should use the “tools” of mainstream economics to build a more rigorous foundation for their analyses. Feminist legal theorists, it was argued, had their hearts...

The flexibility and ubiquity of the term efficiency in tax analysis can be a double-edged sword. While tax scholars are naturally drawn to the notion of efficiency, with its implied virtues of eliminating waste and of guiding policy choices through objective, non-normative analysis, the danger...

Despite the oft-heard claims that current generations are stealing from future generations by running fiscal deficits, both theory and evidence suggest that this is either not true or not knowable. Intergenerational justice is not an appropriate lens through which to analyze fiscal issues,...