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

The Working Families Tax Cuts, enacted through H.R. 1, expanded education choice in the tax code by creating a new federal scholarship tax credit and broadening how families can use 529 savings. That is a meaningful shift in the right direction. Families need more than one path. Parents should be able to choose the school, tutoring, or support that fits their child instead of being boxed into a one-size-fits-all system. A New Federal Tax Credit for Education Freedom One of th

Washington’s priorities are badly out of balance. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in Senate Finance Committee testimony , the federal government allocates about $6 to seniors for every $1 it allocates to children under 18. That would be troubling enough on its own. It is worse because children are now the poorest cohort in America, while seniors as a group are no longer. Washington is allocating more to the politically pow

One of the biggest success stories of the Working Families Tax Cuts was permanent full business expensing for the business assets covered by the law. That reform strengthened investment by letting businesses deduct costs upfront instead of dragging those deductions out over years. Now the next step is clear. Policymakers should move toward full expensing for business structures too, including multifamily housing, factories, offices, warehouses, and other buildings that help t

Democrats rarely stop at taxing the rich. They start there. That is the real lesson from tax history. A tax is sold to the public as a narrow hit on a small group of wealthy households. Then the threshold comes down, the rates go up, inflation does the rest, and the burden spreads far beyond the original target. That pattern has played out before, and it is playing out again now. A New York Example Shows the Problem Bloomberg recently reported that Zohran Mamdani wants to sl

For too many Americans, buying a home has become more complicated, more expensive, and more frustrating than it needs to be. That is why President Trump’s March 13, 2026 executive order matters. Working with HUD Secretary Scott Turner, the administration took a step toward making the homebuying process simpler, faster, and more modern for creditworthy borrowers who are ready to purchase a home. The most useful way to understand this order is not as a final answer to the housi

The death tax remains one of the most destructive taxes in the federal code. It punishes families at the moment of loss and threatens the survival of family farms and small businesses that took decades to build. The “Working Families Tax Cuts” law delivers important relief by making the death tax exemption permanent and protecting families from a massive tax hike that would have taken effect if Congress had failed to act. Permanent Protection From the Death Tax Under the “Wor

The IRS is the nation’s tax collector. It should not also be the nation’s tax preparer. When the same agency that collects taxes also calculates what you owe, a clear conflict of interest arises. The incentives point in only one direction: higher tax bills and less trust in the fairness of the system. That is why proposals to expand the IRS “Direct File” system are misguided. Americans should not have to rely on the tax collector to prepare the very returns that determine how

President Trump’s sweeping tariff policy is now facing problems on two fronts: the courts and the economy. The Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled that key tariffs imposed under emergency authority were illegal , raising serious questions about the administration’s use of executive power to impose broad import taxes. At the same time, a federal trade court has ordered the government to begin refunding tariff payments to businesses , potentially returning billio

Prominent conservative leaders are increasingly calling attention to how large nonprofit hospitals are exploiting the federal 340B drug discount program to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. What began as a program intended to help vulnerable patients afford medications has instead become a lucrative revenue stream for large hospital systems that purchase drugs at steep discounts and bill insurers and taxpayers full price. Critics argue that the program now benefits hospi

College sports work best when the rules are clear and the government stays out of the way. Heavy-handed federal intervention would turn college athletics into another Washington-run bureaucracy. That would empower regulators, enrich trial lawyers, and hand influence to Big Labor, all while making the system more confusing for schools and athletes alike. The better solution is simple: establish clear national rules that everyone understands and follows. That is exactly what th

Raising children has never been cheap. From childcare to adoption to paid leave, many families face significant costs during life’s most important moments. The “Working Families Tax Cuts” respond directly to these challenges by lowering the cost of child and dependent care and providing meaningful tax relief to parents. At the center of these reforms are two major improvements that strengthen financial support for families: a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit and ne

President Joe Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was sold as a major deficit-reduction and drug-savings package. The numbers now point in the opposite direction. A new analysis from the Paragon Health Institute finds that Medicare Part D spending has surged since the law’s enactment. Instead of producing immediate savings, federal drug outlays have increased. What Was Promised At the time of passage, supporters argued the IRA would significantly reduce federal d

Early IRS data show the typical tax refund this year is running roughly 10 to 15 percent higher than at the same point last year. That increase is not random. It reflects pro-worker tax policy that is putting real money back into household budgets. A recent report from CBS News highlights how Americans plan to use their refunds. Many are paying down debt, building emergency savings, or covering essential expenses. The reason refunds are larger is straightforward. The “Workin

More than 4.8 million veterans work in overtime-eligible jobs. About 1.4 million of them regularly put in overtime hours. When those men and women stay late, take extra shifts, or work weekends, they should keep more of what they earn. The “Working Families Tax Cuts” make that possible. This reform ensures that veterans who go the extra mile on the job are not punished by higher federal taxes on their overtime pay. After serving their country, they deserve a tax code that res

Washington has spent years talking about housing affordability. Here is a simple, bipartisan reform that would actually help. This week, the Center for a Free Economy organized and led a coalition letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune urging immediate action on H.R. 1340 and S. 3332, the “More Homes on the Market Act.” The legislation fixes an outdated tax rule that is quietly choking off housing supply and making it harder for middle-class fami

The “Working Families Tax Cuts” deliver real relief to the Americans who work the longest hours and carry the heaviest load. At the center of that relief is the “no tax on overtime” tax cut. Under this policy, overtime workers can exclude up to $12,500 per year in overtime pay from their taxable income, or up to $25,000 per year for married couples. That means the extra hours worked on nights and weekends are no longer fully subject to federal income tax. Work is rewarded. Ef

The Center for a Free Economy supports H.R. 1778, the “American Innovation Act,” introduced by Cong. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) in the U.S. House. This legislation expands first-year tax relief for new businesses and removes an outdated barrier in the tax code that makes it harder to get started. Entrepreneurs take risks, create jobs, and drive growth. The tax code should support that effort, not slow it down. What H.R. 1778 Would Do Under current law, new businesses may deduct o

The One Big Beautiful Budget Act moves federal policy back toward growth, work, and fiscal discipline. Anchored by the Working Families Tax Cuts, the law improves incentives across the economy while pairing tax relief with meaningful spending restraint. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest outlook , the economy strengthens in the near term as a result of the reconciliation law. After payrolls grew by an average of just 70,000 jobs per month in 2025, CBO proje

On Thursday, the Senate HELP committee will consider a series of bills, and entertain amendments. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) will offer several amendments to impose socialized medicine on American patients in the area of prescription drugs. Senators committed to making healthcare more affordable using proven free market solutions should reject his amendments. Sanders Amendment 5 would permit anyone to steal the patent for any prescription drug the government deems too e

President Trump used his State of the Union address to make a clear commitment: protect Social Security and Medicare while expanding access to private retirement savings. He also announced a new initiative aimed at workers who lack access to employer-sponsored 401(k) plans. The proposal would give these workers access to the same retirement plan used by nearly 2 million federal civilian employees, every Member of Congress, and members of the military. It would also include a

Washington just shut down one Medicaid gimmick. States are already building the next one. An important piece in The Federalist  by Brian Blase of the Paragon Health Institute warns that intergovernmental transfers, known as IGTs, are becoming the next major Medicaid taxpayer rip off scheme. If Congress and the Trump administration do not act quickly, this maneuver could explode federal spending all over again. How the IGT Scheme Actually Works Medicaid is jointly funded by s

Nonprofit hospitals receive generous tax breaks. Many are no longer acting like charities. A new National Review  op-ed by Ryan Ellis makes the case clearly: Congress should close the big hospital tax loophole that allows large, highly profitable hospital systems to avoid taxes while providing limited charity care. Federal law grants nonprofit hospitals tax-exempt status in exchange for providing meaningful community benefits. That status is supposed to reflect real charitab

More than 40 million Americans have a Health Savings Account, yet most treat it like a checking account instead of what it truly is: one of the most powerful tax-advantaged savings tools in the tax code. When a medical bill arrives, many families simply swipe the HSA debit card and move on. The balance often sits in cash, earning little or nothing. That approach feels practical, but it sacrifices the most valuable feature of an HSA, which is long-term, tax-free growth. There

Recent redistricting news in Virginia highlights how intense the fight over congressional power has become. Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature advanced new congressional maps that could significantly reduce Republican representation in the state’s 11-seat U.S. House delegation, prompting debate over partisan map drawing and a planned April voter referendum on the changes. While this story has grabbed headlines, it reflects only one chapter in a much larger national

President Trump’s aggressive expansion of trade taxes is weakening the economy, and the latest labor market revision makes that harder to ignore. In 2025 alone, previously reported payroll figures were revised down by 1,029,000 jobs. That is the largest annual downward revision in at least two decades. More than one million jobs that were initially reported as created simply were not there. When job growth is overstated by that magnitude, it signals that the economy is not a

Source: www.whitehouse.gov For the first time in nearly six decades, the federal government is meaningfully smaller. More than 330,000 federal employees have left their positions over the past year through firings, resignations, or retirements, and those roles were not replaced. As a result, total federal employment now stands at roughly 2.7 million , the lowest level since 1966. That outcome did not happen by chance. It reflects deliberate policy decisions made under the Tru

Washington’s spending binge drove up interest rates and made big purchases more expensive for working families. Even as inflation begins to cool, the cost of financing a car remains higher than it should be. The “Working Families Tax Cuts” respond with targeted relief. One key provision allows up to a $10,000 tax deduction for auto loan interest on vehicles assembled in the United States, even if you've already taken the standard deduction. This is practical tax relief aimed

School choice is no longer a niche reform. It is a national movement. Demand is rising across the country, and states continue to move quickly to expand options for families. A new Wall Street Journal op-ed by Kelly Hancock  underscores just how strong that demand has become. In Texas, a record 42,000 education savings account applications flooded in on the very first day  of the state’s new program. That level of interest is not theoretical support. It reflects real parents

The Federal Trade Commission has reached a landmark settlement with Express Scripts , resolving allegations that the pharmacy benefit manager artificially inflated insulin prices and drove up costs for patients. The action confirms what lawmakers have warned for years. PBM abuses are real, systemic, and costly for American patients. Federal Trade Commission Express Scripts Years of Oversight Set the Stage This outcome did not come out of nowhere. It follows years of sustained

Washington has spent years talking about affordability while making it harder for families to get ahead. Housing costs remain elevated. Health care bills keep climbing. Energy prices stay volatile. At the same time, federal spending continues to drive price pressures that hit working families first and hardest. That is why the Republican Study Committee’s Reconciliation 2.0 framework, “Making the American Dream Affordable Again ,”  deserves serious attention. It reflects a go