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For many years, there has been a robust debate about whether the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund balances actually mean anything if the payroll taxes collected for them were spent rather than saved (as seems intuitive in a trust fund). Today, unfortunately, there appears to be a bipartisan embrace of an even more problematic concept: persistently crediting the Trust Funds with tax revenue that has never even been collected. The latest example of this is the so-called “jobs bill” that just passed both chambers in Congress. A centerpiece of that legislation is the Schumer-Hatch “Hire Now Tax Cut,” known colloquially as a “payroll tax holiday.”

In this morning’s Washington Post, Senator Hatch highlights the misuse of reconciliation procedures that the President and Senate Democrats are considering in order to pass a health care bill that cannot muster 60 votes. As we previously discussed here, reconciliation procedures were designed as a set of specific rules to facilitate passage of legislation to reduce the deficit.

One of the more amazing aspects of the health-care debate is how steady public opinion has remained. Despite repeated and intense sales efforts by the president and his allies in Congress, most Americans consistently oppose the plan that has become the centerpiece of this legislative season. For every person who strongly favors it, two are strongly opposed. Why can't the president move the numbers? One reason may be that he keeps talking about details of the proposal while voters are looking at the issue in a broader context.

Heated debate continues to rage in the United States on whether the economic recovery will be V-shaped (with a rapid return to robust growth above potential), U-shaped (slow anemic, sub-par, below trend growth for at least the next two years) or W-shaped (a double-dip recession). slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery—at best—in 2010.

Phillip Swagel, Former Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department publishes exclusive slides outlining key issues of financial regulatory reform ranging from non-bank resolutions to bankruptcy such as the Frank-Dodd-Geithner proposal to tranching as an improvement to non-bank resolution.

Over five years, my research shows an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure. That's a bad deal. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and her husband, David, have been major contributors to research on tax multipliers. Their results, which rely on the history of U.S. tax legislation since 1945, show tax multipliers of larger magnitude than the one I found.