Social Security was created in 1935 as a hedge against “poverty-ridden old age.” That mission is hard to square with the system Washington runs now. A couple claiming the maximum benefit at age 70 can receive about $124,000 a year in Social Security, even as younger and generally poorer workers keep paying payroll taxes into a program projected to hit insolvency in 2032. That is not a focused safety net. It is a sign that Social Security has drifted far from its original purp

Affordability keeps getting worse in many states for a simple reason: government spending has grown far faster than taxpayers’ ability to support it. Vance Ginn recently pointed to a clear benchmark for fiscal discipline, and the numbers make the case. From 2016 to 2025, aggregate state spending excluding federal transfers rose 65.8%, while the sustainable benchmark of population growth plus inflation rose just 32.4%. That gap helps explain why so many states keep talking ab

The first filing season under the Working Families Tax Cuts is already showing what certainty and tax relief look like in practice. Families and businesses no longer have to guess whether key parts of the tax code will vanish after one more election cycle. The law made major tax relief permanent, and now millions of Americans are seeing the results in their returns, refunds, deductions, and long-term planning. According to new Treasury Department data , the first tax season u

Tax season is when tax policy stops being abstract. Small business owners see it in what they owe, what they can deduct, and how much they can reinvest in the future. That made the recent podcast featuring CFE President Ryan Ellis and Brian Reardon of the S-Corporation Association especially timely, as the two discussed how the Working Families Tax Cuts improved the tax code for small and family-owned businesses. The conversation focused on the parts of the law that do the m

Tax Day is one of the most dreaded days of the year. This year, it also came with a reminder of what Congress prevented. If the family and business tax relief enacted in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had expired, American households would now be facing a broad and immediate tax increase. Instead, The Working Families Tax Cuts stopped what could have been one of the largest tax hikes in decades. What Congress Prevented Had that 2017 tax relief expired, taxpayers would have fa

Washington can project 3% real GDP growth for the next decade. That does not make it plausible. If the labor force is barely growing , the only way to hit that kind of sustained economic growth is to assume an extraordinary, long-running surge in productivity. That is not serious budgeting. It is wishcasting. The Trump budget leans on roughly 3% real GDP growth for years to come. But the economy does not grow by magic. Real growth comes from more workers, more output per work

Democrats still talk as if tax relief for working families mainly helps the rich. The facts point in the other direction. Data from the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and the latest IRS data summarized by Tax Foundation show that lower-income Americans receive larger percentage tax relief, while higher earners continue to pay the highest tax rates and the largest share of federal income taxes. That matters because the fairness debate around tax policy is often driven mo

California’s latest hospice crackdown is not an isolated scandal. It is another sign that Gavin Newsom’s California has become an epicenter of government waste, fraud, and corruption, with Medicaid standing at the center of the problem. Federal officials have now suspended 221 hospice and healthcare providers in Los Angeles over suspected fraud, and they say that number is likely to keep rising. That should not surprise anyone who has watched California pour more money into

Last night’s NCAA men’s basketball championship capped off a March Madness season full of busted brackets, missed bets, and office pools gone wrong. For most people who put money on the tournament, the final result meant a loss. But under the tax code, even people who break even over time can still owe tax on money they never actually earned. That is because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act limits gambling loss deductions to 90% of losses starting in 2025. A gambler who wins an

The Working Families Tax Cuts made a major pro-growth fix to the tax code by making it easier for businesses to deduct the cost of investment up front instead of dragging those deductions out over years. That matters most for small and family-owned businesses that need cash flow, certainty, and a tax code that rewards expansion instead of penalizing it. The law permanently restored full business expensing for investments purchased in 2025 and onward. It made small business e

A strong 2025 for small businesses is a reminder that when entrepreneurs get breathing room, they tend to use it well. A new “ Small Business Check Up Survey ” from the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council found that 71% of small business owners said their financial performance improved in 2025 compared to 2024, while 84% said performance met or exceeded expectations. That is a welcome sign for the economy, but it is also a policy lesson. Lower taxes and a more stable bu

The U.S. Postal Service is losing money because it is built for a market that is disappearing. As Chris Edwards argues in a recent Cato post, the USPS has lost money every year since 2007, mail volumes have kept falling, and the package business is no longer enough to make up the difference. Congress still acts as if the old postal model can be preserved. Paper mail is fading, private firms are winning more package business, and the case for privatization is getting harder to

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act fixed a major problem in the U.S. tax code. For years, America’s high corporate tax rate and flawed international rules pushed companies to move overseas on paper, taking profits, headquarters, and long-term investment with them. A new push to raise the corporate rate would risk reopening that wound. Stephen Moore and Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently highlighted what happened after tax reform. As Moore notes, corporate inversions effect

A recent Townhall op-ed by Stephen Moore argues that Republicans can win on healthcare affordability by taking on the interests that profit from a costly and opaque system. That argument deserves attention, especially when paired with fresh evidence showing just how much the biggest health insurers have been making while Washington kept the Obamacare subsidy machine running. The latest chart on insurer operating profits makes the point clearly. UnitedHealth, CVS/Aetna, Cigna

The Working Families Tax Cuts include one of the clearest pro-worker reforms in the law: no tax on tips. Eligible workers can deduct up to $25,000 in qualified tips earned starting in 2025, whether they take the standard deduction or itemize. For millions of Americans in restaurants, hospitality, transportation, and personal service jobs, that means more of their earnings stay in their own pockets. Federal estimates say about 6 million workers report tipped wages, and the ave

Social Security is running out of time. The Social Security trust fund is projected to be depleted in 2032, and Washington has already missed the chance to fix the problem gradually. That failure has consequences. Reform can no longer be delayed, and it can no longer be painless. The real question now is who should bear the burden. Taxpayers should not be forced to send even more money into a broken system. The fairest remaining option is to reduce benefits on a means-tested

Earlier this week, the Center for a Free Economy pointed to economist Mark Perry’s well-known “Chart of the Century” to make a simple point. The prices that have risen fastest in America are not random. They are concentrated in sectors where government plays the biggest role. That pattern is hard to miss. Hospital services, college tuition, child care, and medical care services have all risen far faster than overall inflation since 2000. By contrast, products and services wit

The latest IRS migration data shows that Americans are still moving to low-tax states and taking income, investment, and economic opportunity with them . From 2022 to 2023, Florida alone posted a net adjusted gross income gain of about $21 billion. At the same time, high-tax states such as California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey posted some of the largest losses. The pattern is hard to miss. People and money are flowing toward lower-tax, faster-growing s

This week, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee will mark up five narrow bills that would each, in their own way, make the tax code work better for taxpayers. The Center for a Free Economy is proud to endorse all five bills. They are: H.R. 2347, the "Survivor Justice Tax Prevention Act," sponsored by Congressman Lloyd Smucker (R-Penn.) This bill would make it clear that monies taxpayers receive as damages for sexual assault do not require invasive and re-traumatizing inq

Hospital prices have been out of control for years, and Congress is finally starting to ask why. At a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health hearing last week on health care affordability, lawmakers focused on one of the biggest drivers of rising costs: large nonprofit hospital systems that enjoy major public subsidies while doing too little to justify them. That is a welcome shift. Washington often talks about health care costs in broad terms. But this proble