Leonard Burman Quotations

Will Rogers once said, 'If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.' Medicare is in a deep hole. Maybe it is time to stop digging.

The deficit is a little smaller because of this voluntary tax.

The experience with past employer (tax) credits is they're not particularly effective,

The subsidies encourage people to get insurance at work, stifling the individual non-group market, and they encourage employers to provide overly generous insurance since the cost is subsidized. What's more, the subsidy is upside down - aiding mostly the high-income families that would probably purchase insurance under any scenario, and providing little aid to those of modest means.

This is a problem that should have been dealt with when we had the money, and it wasn't.

It's generating a huge portion of our tax revenues,

There was a proposal in Congress that would raise a point of order against any tax proposal that would not deal with the AMT. It died.

All economists agree tax policy has an effect on the economy. The hard thing is to figure out how to measure these effects in the real world.