What's in a word? Plenty, when it's a word such as taxes, spending, or deficits that pervades Washington political debate despite lacking coherent economic content. The United States is moving toward a possible catastrophic fiscal collapse. The country may not get there, but the risk is unmistakable and growing. The fiscal language of taxes, spending, and deficits has played a huge and underappreciated role in the decisions that have pushed the nation in this dangerous direction. This book proposes a better fiscal language for U.S. budgetary policy, rooted in economic fundamentals such as...

What's in a word? Plenty, when it's a word such as taxes, spending, or deficits that pervades Washington political debate despite lacking coherent economic content. The United States is moving toward a possible catastrophic fiscal collapse. The country may not get there, but the risk is unmistakable and growing. The fiscal language of taxes, spending, and deficits has played a huge and underappreciated role in the decisions that have pushed the nation in this dangerous direction. This book proposes a better fiscal language for U.S. budgetary policy, rooted in economic fundamentals such as...

International tax rules, which determine how countries tax cross-border investment, are increasingly important with the rise of globalization, but the modern U.S. rules, even more than those in most other countries, are widely recognized as dysfunctional. The existing debate over how to reform the U.S. tax rules is stuck in a sterile dialectic, in which ostensibly the only permissible choices are worldwide or residence-based taxation of U.S. companies with the allowance of foreign tax credits, versus outright exemption of the companies' foreign source income....