Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has released a new list of ten wasteful tax expenditures, totaling $130 billion over the next ten years. Whether it is tax breaks for NASCAR tracks, fishing tackle boxes, or films produced in the U.S., the list serves as a clear sign that there are plenty of places to look to raise revenue from tax expenditures. Coburn's list is below.

Urban Institute scholar and CRFB board member Gene Steuerle writes in his blog The Government We Deserve that the current revenue proposals from both sides simply aren't enough to make a substantial dent in the deficit.

Yesterday, the Fix the Debt Campaign had a event with two roundtables bringing together many health policy and tax experts from across the political spectrum to discuss two of the central issues involved in the current budget negotiations.

In a new paper yesterday, we showed how policymakers could raise revenue exclusively from higher earners without increasing rates. Specifically, we showed three models which would phase in different types of tax expenditures caps on income above $200,000 ($250,000 for households) in a way that raised revenue similar to what would be generated by allowing the upper-income tax cuts to expire.

As was the case two years ago, the 2001/2003 tax cuts will be a hot topic in the lame duck session. Democrats would like to extend the full tax cuts only for people making less than $250,000, while Republicans would prefer to extend them fully for most everyone (leaving out refundable tax credit expansions from 2009).

First off, CRFB would like to congratulate President Obama and all of those who were elected and re-elected to the Senate and the House. CRFB is looking forward to continue working with policymakers from both sides of the aisle to help make deficit reduction a reality.

Over at Wonkblog, Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein have worked with analysts at Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy to create an individual tax reform calculator. The calculator comes in versions for both Governor Mitt Romney's plan and President Obama's plan.

Recently, we released an analysis demonstrating that it is indeed possible to substantially reduce tax rates while still cutting the deficit. Despite some claims that repealing all tax expenditures could reduce the top rate to only 38% (or by only 4 percent), we showed that doing so would allow the top rate to fall to 23 percent while still allowing for over $1 trillion in deficit reduction.

After we analyzed a part of it two weeks ago, Governor Mitt Romney's tax plan is back in the news, with a proposed deduction cap as the subject of a new Tax Policy Center study. He had mentioned a $25,000 dollar cap on deductions as a possibility in his tax plan during the debate Tuesday night and has previously proposed a $17,000 cap.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) yesterday released his "Wastebook" for 2012, a laundry list of government waste and inefficiency. Coburn finds 100 examples of government spending clearly not serving its designed purpose.  

Wastebook's examples include: