Congress should either turn Social Security into a general revenue program with no earmarked taxes or make it a genuinely self-supporting program that receives no general revenue transfers.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the Securities and Exchange Commission have taken actions recently that could have profound impact on the nation's financial system.

In a just-published piece in Tax Notes, AEI economists Kevin Hassett and Alan Viard explain how targeted tax increases on big oil companies pose significant risks to the economy.

Make the Treasury Department truly responsible for managing all the government's debt. Managing only Treasury securities deals with only about half, and sometimes less than half, of the effective government debt.

Many public workers are overpaid relative to their private sector counterparts, especially in large, unionized states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and California. This may sound like a controversial claim, but it shouldn't. A consensus is building about the need for reform.

Despite frequent, dire warnings about the unsustainability of government budget deficits in the United States, Europe and Japan, investors are lining up to lend to some governments at very low interest rates.

A federal mandate requires states to give an individual income tax exemption for interest income from Treasury and some other federal obligations, but that exemption should be repealed, allowing market forces to shape the allocation of Treasury securities across investors.

It went virtually unnoticed (and unreported by this newspaper), but last week a federal court found the government of Iran liable for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.