Stenholm Focuses on Budget Goals

Although it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to make substantive changes in the tax code, the current focus for Congress should be on deficit reduction and spending cuts to get to a balanced budget by 2002, Congressman Charles W. Stenholm (D-TX) told participants at the third session of 1995's Capital Formation Breakfast Series. If we focus on the tax side of the equation first, the danger is forgetting about the deficit, he added.

The congressman, who serves on the House Budget and Agriculture Committees, readily acknowledged the new opportunities that exist in the 104th Congress for reshaping the tax code. "The current challenges before us give us excellent opportunities to accomplish many of the things we've been working on for years," he said. "I'm eager to examine a VAT [value-added tax], or to otherwise reshape our current tax code so that America can effectively meet our competition," he said.

Congressman Stenholm expressed the hope that a new, properly structured tax-one that would replace the current income tax system-would have strong bipartisan support and perhaps be enacted as quickly as within the next few years.

ACCF Center for Policy Research Publishes Tax Policy Book

As the 104th Congress and the Clinton administration consider changes in federal fiscal policy, the ACCF Center for Policy Research presents new studies by public finance scholars on the following topics certain to be at the forefront of the tax policy debate:

• Strategies for increasing the personal saving rate;
  
  
• The incidence of the corporate income tax versus a consumption tax in an open economy; and
  
  
• The impact of U.S. international tax rules on the competitiveness of American multinationals.

These studies were presented at the symposium, "Tax Policy and Economic Growth," held June 8, 1994, and published as a monograph of the same title.

This is the 11th volume published as part of the ACCF Center for Policy Research multi-year project, "Tax, Regulatory, and Environmental Policies & U.S. Economic Growth."