The Kitchen Table Ledger: What the Numbers Say About Parties, Taxes, and the Debt

Nov 2, 2026 · @Jessica Marschall

By Jessica Irving Marschall, CPA, President and CEO, Marschall Accounting Services, LLC

A friend recently wrote to me with a request I wish I received more often. Prior to the 2026 Midterm election, she would like a quantitative data-driven article on whether the economy does better under Democrats or Republicans, and rather than keep going back and forth with political opinions, she wanted actual research. She also asked what the wealthiest Americans really pay compared to middle-income and lower-income families, and how higher taxes at the top could fund things that help working families. Her reason is the one that persuaded me to write this down: she wants her children, one of whom cannot vote for a couple more years, to vote with knowledge.

I am a CPA who has spent 26 years inside other people’s tax returns, and I own small businesses myself, so I come to this with a ledger and with a bias, which I disclose below. What follows is my attempt to separate the arithmetic from the mythology, the same exercise I tried with Social Security in The Arithmetic of 2032. If you want the conclusions before the evidence, here they are.

• The historical pattern is real. Since World War II the economy has grown faster, on average, with a Democrat in the White House. Nobody has proved that the president is the reason, and the best research suggests that a good share of the gap looks like luck.
• Neither party owns fiscal responsibility. Deficits have ballooned under both, and publicly held debt has now passed 100 percent of the economy for the first time since 1946.
• The tax system is progressive until it is not. The federal system charges higher earners higher rates, yet one study using a broad measure of economic income, rather than taxable income, finds that the very richest households pay a lower rate than the average American. That result depends on the measure and is not universal.
• Taxing the wealthy can help, but it cannot do the whole job. The hole is too large, and rate increases alone raise less than most people assume.
• The fix will be a compromise or it will not happen. Under current Senate rules, a major Social Security repair would generally need 60 votes, which neither party is likely to reach alone.

One party does not have all of the answers. I would be suspicious of anyone, including me, who tells you otherwise.

What the Scorecard Says

The other spouse in this story will not enjoy the first finding, so I will state it plainly and then give them their due. Every serious compilation reaches the same direction: since World War II, the economy has grown faster and added more jobs, on average, with a Democrat in the White House. Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel, a former member of the Council of Economic Advisers under a Democratic president, calls the fact a puzzle precisely because it sounds like a partisan talking point and yet holds up. The Economic Policy Institute, the Joint Economic Committee Democrats, and Presidential Data all point the same way.

Notice that three honest calculations of the same growth gap run from about 1.2 to 1.9 percentage points. The answer depends on the start date and on which year is charged to which president, and anyone who quotes a single number without its period is selling something.

In contrasting presentation EPI is a labor-aligned think tank, the JEC paper comes from the committee’s Democratic staff, and Presidential Data states its conclusion in its banner headline, so these are advocates’ compilations of government data, however accurate the underlying numbers may be. I checked Presidential Data against its own tables and found it needs care. It reports that Republican deficits are 8.5 percent higher, yet its total deficit figures of 2.68 and 2.57 percent differ by about 4 percent; the 8.5 percent comes from its on-budget table. It reports trade deficits 15 percent higher under Republicans when its own totals differ by about 3 percent. It also reports Biden at 5.1 million jobs a year by dividing by three in a row that lists four years. Because the underlying data appear to end around mid-2024, neither a three-year nor a four-year divisor produces a precise annualized rate. The chart below uses the four years listed and shows approximately 3.8 million jobs per year, but this should be understood as a simplified presentation of the source data rather than a precise annualized estimate.

Rebuilt from Presidential Data (Jere Glover), Democrats and the Economy, August 2024, GDP table; underlying data from the Economic Report of the President.

The chart makes the point I most want a teenager to see. The averages differ, but no party owns the top or the bottom. Reagan and Ford beat Carter, Biden and Obama on this measure, and Obama, who inherited the 2008 collapse, sits near the bottom alongside Bush II and Trump, whose final year was the pandemic.

Rebuilt from Presidential Data, jobs table; underlying data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm payrolls. Biden shown over the four years listed, data through mid-2024.

The jobs picture tells the same story with one more warning. Trump’s first term ends in the pandemic and Biden’s begins with the rebound, so those two bars measure a virus and a recovery as much as any policy. Weekly earnings are also less tidy than the headline suggests. Presidential Data shows average real weekly earnings growing 0.44 percent a year under Democrats and falling 0.1 percent under Republicans, yet its own table shows Trump’s first term at 1.56 percent a year, second only to Kennedy, and Carter’s at negative 2.25 percent, the worst of all. Finally, none of these compilations reach Trump’s second term, so the record stops in 2024.

Why Presidents Get Too Much Credit and Too Much Blame

The pattern is unlikely to be pure chance, and it is also unlikely to mean what partisans want it to mean. Frankel points out that nine of the last ten recessions began under a Republican, and that in ten of ten party handoffs he examined, growth moved in the direction the pattern predicts. He then says what his own side rarely says: even those who favor Democratic policies have a hard time explaining a gap this large, because powerful events routinely swamp anything a president controls, and many policies take longer than a term to work.

The most careful study I know is by Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, published in the American Economic Review in 2016. They confirmed a gap of about 1.8 percentage points, or about 1.4 points after excluding the Korean War administrations. Then they went looking for the cause, and the result should humble everyone at the kitchen table. The gap was not explained by more expansionary fiscal or monetary policy under Democrats. It came mainly from more benign oil shocks, stronger productivity, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumers. In their working paper the authors say that these factors explain about half of the gap, and that the first three look a lot more like good luck than good policy. EPI, for all of its enthusiasm, concedes the same limit: its data do not claim to measure a causal effect.

The recession count needs the same care. The JEC’s 10 of 11 is accurate as a matter of calendar only if the count begins in 1953. The November 1948 recession began under Truman, so a count from the end of the war is 10 of 12. The NBER dates also show recessions beginning in March 2001, about two months into the Bush presidency, and in February 2020, on the eve of a pandemic. The one Democratic recession since 1953, in 1980, came from Paul Volcker’s fight against inflation, a fight that Carter deserves credit for starting and that most economists consider worth the price. Frankel makes this very point. Sound policy can cause a recession on one president’s watch and a boom on the next one’s.

So here is the sentence I would put on the refrigerator: the record does not support the claim that the economy does better under Republicans, and it does not prove that Democrats are the reason it did better under them. Both halves of that sentence are true, and each spouse gets to keep one.

The Debt Has Two Parents

On the debt, the partisan scorecard nearly disappears. Presidential Data’s own average deficits since 1946 are 2.57 percent of GDP under Democrats and 2.68 percent under Republicans, a difference that no fair reader should build an argument upon. Federal spending has actually grown faster under Republicans in its table, which will surprise the voter who assumes the opposite.

1946 to 2024 rebuilt from Presidential Data’s total deficit table (OMB Historical Tables; 2024 is its August 2024 estimate). FY 2025 from Tax Foundation; FY 2026 from the Treasury figures reported by 24/7 Wall St. Each fiscal year is colored by the president in office for most of it, with no lag.

This picture rewards a slow look. Charging each year to whoever sat in the Oval Office is a blunt instrument. Fiscal 2009 belongs to Obama in this table, although it began in October 2008 in the middle of the financial crisis. Fiscal 2021 belongs to Biden, although a good part of it was pandemic spending begun under Trump. The surpluses of the late 1990s came with a Democratic president and a Republican Congress, after deficit deals that included tax increases in 1990 and 1993. The president who signed the 1990 deal paid for his broken no new taxes pledge with his reelection, a fact that explains a good deal about how timid both parties have been ever since.

The present numbers are the part no one can spin. Treasury data for fiscal 2026, as reported by 24/7 Wall St., show debt held by the public at $32.2 trillion, or 100.03 percent of GDP, the first time it has exceeded the economy since 1946. The deficit was $1.99 trillion, about 6.2 percent of GDP. Net interest reached $1.052 trillion, or nearly $2.9 billion a day, which is more than the $965 billion spent on national defense and about 19.5 percent of everything Washington collected. The Congressional Budget Office projects 120 percent of GDP by 2036. Interest buys no road, no hospital, and no ship.

The tempting answer is that we will simply grow our way out. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued for that path, and growth does help; the economy grew at a 3.4 percent annual rate in the most recent quarter, according to advance estimates. But CBO Director Phillip Swagel has warned that growth is unlikely to do the job alone, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has said the same, and Bloomberg Opinion carried that argument in its headline on November 2. One bond manager’s arithmetic put the required nominal growth near 6.9 percent a year for a decade. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that bringing deficits to 3 percent of GDP by 2036 would take roughly $10 trillion of deficit reduction. Hold on to that $10 trillion, because every proposal later in this article has to be measured against it.

Reaganomics: Facts, Falsehoods, and What Each Side Forgets

No debate in my profession is more encrusted with mythology than this one, and both parties have an edited version of Ronald Reagan. Reagan inherited stagflation and pursued four goals: less spending, lower taxes, less regulation, and controlled growth of the money supply. The record of those goals is mixed in ways that neither bumper sticker admits.

The distinction in that last row matters. Supply-side economics is the serious idea that incentives at the margin affect work, saving and investment, and it is true to a degree that depends heavily on the starting point. A cut from a 70 percent top rate is a different event from a cut at 37 percent. Trickle down is the cruder promise that money handed to those at the top will find its way to everyone else, and on that promise the evidence is unkind.

The broadest test I have found is by David Hope and Julian Limberg of the London School of Economics and King’s College London, covering major tax cuts for the rich in 18 wealthy countries from 1965 to 2015. The cuts raised the income share of the top 1 percent and had no significant effect on growth or unemployment. Kansas ran the experiment at state scale in 2012 and 2013, cutting its top bracket and exempting pass-through business income; as Georgetown’s summary recounts, private job growth from 2012 to 2017 was 4.2 percent against 9.4 percent nationally, and Kansas repealed the cuts in 2017. Its overall judgment seems right to me: Reaganomics helped the economy out of a slump without closing the wealth gap.

The finest Reagan moment, in my opinion, is the one his modern admirers mention least. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 drew on a proposal by two Democrats, Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt, and it cut the top rate to 28 percent by closing loopholes and broadening the base. It was bipartisan, it treated taxpayers more evenly, and as a tax professional I still admire the design. Sadly, as Georgetown notes, the loopholes have crept back.

My Confession: I Love These Tax Laws

Here is the bias I promised to disclose. As a small business owner and as a tax advisor, I love the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provisions as a practitioner. The 20 percent qualified business income deduction is close to magic for an eligible pass-through owner, and the OBBBA made it permanent (those of us in specified service businesses lose it above the income thresholds, which is a grievance for another day). The flat 21 percent corporate rate changed the entity conversation with every client I have. Add the expanded qualified small business stock exclusion under Section 1202, including 50 percent exclusion after three years, 75 percent after four years, and 100 percent after five years for qualifying stock acquired after July 4, 2025, immediate deduction of eligible domestic research expenditures under Section 174A, and permanent Opportunity Zones, and I have spent the better part of two years gleefully teaching people how to use all of it. In Lifting the Bottom of the K, I argued that these strategies should not be reserved for Fortune 500 companies, and I meant it. A machine shop in Fredericksburg deserves the same playbook as a fund in Manhattan.

But a CPA who only reads the income side of the statement is not doing her job. Loving a deduction on my own return tells you nothing about whether the country can afford it, and the net effects need to be evaluated by the same standard I would apply to a client’s business plan.

The best news for tax cut supporters comes from three economists who are nobody’s cheerleaders. Chodorow-Reich, Zidar and Zwick found that the TCJA did what its designers said it would do in one important respect: total tangible corporate investment rose by about 11 percent, the authors’ reading of a loose consensus across studies, and firms with larger tax reductions invested more. The worse news comes from the same paper. By their estimate, the law reduced corporate tax revenue by about 40 percent of its pre-reform level, the long-run boost to GDP was under 1 percent, and the gain in labor income was under $1,000 per employee, against the $4,000 to $9,000 that the Council of Economic Advisers predicted. Full expensing delivered about half of the capital accumulation of the rate cut for about one-third of the cost, which is the sort of finding a thoughtful legislator should use. It says that some tax cuts are good buys and others are expensive.

The OBBBA ledger comes from the Tax Foundation, which favors lower rates and is no enemy of the law. William McBride, its chief economist, credits it with lowering marginal rates permanently and with a long-run GDP gain of about 1.2 percent, and then does the arithmetic:

In other words, by the estimate of an organization sympathetic to the policy, growth recovers about a quarter of the cost. Publicly held debt reaches about 124 percent of GDP by 2034, or about 120 percent if the tariffs were to remain in place. That caveat has since bitten: the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February 2026, and the replacement global tariff under Section 122 rests on a 150-day authority unless Congress extends it, although tariffs under other statutes remain in place, so the offset deserves significant skepticism. The law also worsened the Social Security picture by reducing revenue from the taxation of benefits (see my article on the balance needed on SSA.)

The distribution is the other half of the net effect. CBO’s analysis of the final law projects that the lowest-income tenth of households lose about $1,200 a year in resources, or 3.1 percent of income, largely from Medicaid and SNAP reductions; middle-income households gain about $800 to $1,200; and the top tenth gain about $13,600. I can love QBI and still read that table honestly. In fairness to the law’s defenders, those figures exclude any later growth effects and the costs of the debt itself, and those debt costs fall on my children and yours.

What the Wealthiest Actually Pay

The honest answer to this question is another question: compared to what income, and counting which taxes? Most family arguments on this subject happen because each spouse is quoting a true number from a different column.

Read across and each side of the marriage gets a turn. If you measure federal income tax, the system is steeply progressive. The top 1 percent earned 20.6 percent of income and paid 38.4 percent of federal income taxes, and the lowest fifth has a negative income tax rate of about 10 percent after refundable credits. Anyone who says that the wealthy pay nothing is simply wrong. The top 1 percent also pay 27.3 percent of all federal taxes on 17.8 percent of income.

Then move down the table. State and local systems run the other way, because sales and excise taxes take about 7 percent from the lowest-income families and about 1 percent from the top 1 percent. Payroll taxes also lean regressive, at 9.5 percent for the lowest fifth and 6.1 percent for the top fifth. A waitress feels those taxes on every paycheck. Once everything is added up, the overall system is much closer to proportional than either the income tax numbers or the slogans imply.

The last row is the most contested and the most interesting. Balkir, Saez, Yagan and Zucman matched the Forbes 400 to actual tax returns and found a total effective rate of 24 percent in 2018 to 2020, compared with 30 percent for the population and 45 percent for top labor earners. The rate had been about 30 percent before the TCJA. The reason is not criminal evasion, and any tax professional can explain it. Much of billionaires’ economic income stays inside companies whose stock they do not sell, and those C corporations pay few dividends. Pass-through businesses often show negative taxable income despite positive book income. Assets held until death receive a stepped-up basis. These are the same provisions I use for clients, at a vastly different scale.

There is a fair objection, and her spouse should raise it. Economic income counts profits and gains that owners have not received and that may later disappear, about 9 points of the 24 come from corporate taxes allocated to the owners, and economists such as David Splinter dispute these methods. The authors themselves caution that the result depends on how income is defined. My own reading is that both statements hold at once: the federal system asks more of high earners, and at the very peak, where income stops being a paycheck, it asks less than a surgeon pays.

What Taxing the Wealthy Could Fund, and What It Could Not

Higher taxes at the top could help working families, but only if we are honest about three limits and I am not interested in taxes for the sake of taxes.

The first limit is that a higher rate is not the same thing as more money. A new paper discussed by the Tax Foundation from Moore, Pecoraro and Splinter estimates that, once income shifting is counted, raising the top federal rate from 37 to 48 percent adds only about $43 billion, or 0.2 percent of GDP, and that once state and local revenue losses are counted the best rate is near 39 percent. Earlier work by Diamond and Saez placed the peak, counting all taxes, at 73 percent on a broad base and 54 percent on the actual base. These economists disagree, and the Tax Foundation has a point of view, but the lesson for a practitioner is familiar. When rates rise on a leaky base, my profession goes to work. That is why I would start with the base rather than the rate.

The second limit is scale. Against the $10 trillion needed to reach a 3 percent deficit, even several good revenue ideas would fall short, which is why serious plans have long been mixtures. A Bowles-Simpson style balance runs about 40 percent revenue and 60 percent spending. Anyone promising that billionaires alone will pay for everything is repeating the Laffer error in a different accent.

The third limit is that the money must actually arrive at the kitchen table. Revenue is not a benefit until someone decides how to use it, and a dollar spent on interest helps no family.

Within those limits, here is where the revenue is most defensible and where it would do the most good.

• Collect what is already owed. This is the closest thing to free money in the federal budget. Research led by a Treasury economist found that each extra dollar spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile returned more than $12 in revenue over time, counting later compliance by those audited, and about $36 at the very top, compared with about $5 below the median. These are revenue ratios rather than net fiscal returns, and the top estimates rest on small samples, but no one’s tax rate has to change.
• Narrow the gap between income from work and income from wealth. Limiting step-up in basis on very large estates and curbing the use of paper losses by the ultra-wealthy would reach the group in the last row of my table, and not the owner of a landscaping company. Forbes 400 decedents paid 8 percent of wealth in estate tax when married.
• Keep what demonstrably works. Expensing and research deductions earn their cost better than rate cuts do, so I would protect them.
• Point the money at things families can see. That means restoring the $900 billion in Medicaid and SNAP reductions where the need is real, stabilizing health coverage, supporting child care, and shoring up Social Security.

Americans seem to understand this instinctively. In one review of 292 local property tax ballot measures, 84 percent passed, largely because voters could see exactly where the money would go. People resent taxes they cannot trace. They will often vote for a library.

Social Security Must Be Fixed, and the Math Will Not Wait

If the debate above feels abstract, this one has a date on it. I laid out the details in The Arithmetic of 2032, and the realities have not improved. The 2026 Trustees Report projects that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will exhaust its reserves in the fourth quarter of 2032. At that point, continuing income would cover approximately 78 percent of scheduled retirement and survivor benefits, leaving a 22 percent funding shortfall under current law. The separate Disability Insurance Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent throughout the 75-year projection period. If the two trust funds were combined, their reserves would be depleted in 2034, when continuing income would cover approximately 83 percent of scheduled combined benefits. These are projections under current law, not predictions that Congress will permit the reductions to occur. Nevertheless, without legislative intervention, full scheduled retirement and survivor benefits could not continue to be paid after OASI reserve depletion.

The cause is demographic and not a conspiracy theory of some sort. Roughly five workers supported each beneficiary in 1960, and about 2.9 do so today, on the way to about 2.2. The 75-year shortfall is about 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, or on the order of $30 trillion. Each party has its favorite myth. One says that lifting the $184,500 wage cap solves everything; it would help substantially, but by itself it would not fully close the gap under most actuarial analyses. The other says that the trust fund was looted and that immigrants are draining it; the fund was never a vault, and immigrants, including those without legal status, pay in far more than they are ever likely to collect.

The workable repairs are few: more revenue, a later eligibility age for those who can bear it, and slower benefit growth for the highest lifetime earners. A proposal published through Brookings by Primus, Watson and Smalligan reaches 75-year solvency with an even mix of tax increases and benefit changes while protecting those already receiving benefits. Here again the structure forces compromise. Social Security benefit changes are excluded from the ordinary budget reconciliation process, and under current Senate rules, major legislation generally requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. That makes bipartisan agreement the most practical route to a durable solution. The 1983 rescue, signed by Reagan and negotiated with Democrats through a bipartisan commission, bought four decades. The Suozzi and Cole commission bill, H.R. 9187, tries to repeat that formula. For a teenager, this is the most personal item in this article, because the cost of delay lands on the youngest workers and because a fix will be negotiated while they are starting their careers.

Property Taxes: Relief That Does Not Hit the Middle Class Through the Back Door

For most middle-class families, the tax that actually arrives in an envelope is the property tax bill. It is no surprise that states are moving fast. The National Association of Counties counted at least 168 state property tax actions in 40 states and the District of Columbia from January 2020 through June 2026, with 72 percent of them relief measures, in states as politically different as Texas and Minnesota. At least 15 states have discussed abolishing the tax outright, and none has passed it. North Dakota voters rejected elimination 63 to 37 in 2024. Property tax anger is genuinely bipartisan, which makes this the most hopeful section of this article.

The data, from an association of the counties that collect the tax, are worth reading with that in mind and are also surprising. The median bill rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2024, from $2,043 to $3,211, yet most of that was inflation; in constant dollars the increase was about 9 percent. Home values doubled while the effective rate fell about 18 percent. The grievance is still legitimate, because a retired couple cannot spend home equity at the grocery store, and income growth has not been even. Property taxes are also highly local: schools receive the largest share, about 41 percent.

The trap is that the most popular remedy shifts the burden rather than reducing it. On the November 3 ballot, Florida’s Amendment 3 would increase the homestead exemption for non-school property taxes to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, with subsequent inflation adjustments, at an estimated annual cost of $11.8 billion by tax year 2031, although its full fiscal effects remain uncertain. Persons who were not Florida residents on December 31, 2026 would initially receive the existing homestead exemption, with eligibility for the increased exemption beginning in their fifth year of exemption, subject to constitutional limitations.

The proposal also includes restrictions on assessment increases for certain non-homestead properties and additional provisions governing local government taxation and expenditures. The cost of the fire department does not disappear when part of the tax base is exempted. Unless spending falls or replacement revenue is provided, the burden can shift toward other property owners, including businesses and landlords, or result in reduced services. As a small business owner, I would note that Main Street can be on the receiving end of that shift as well.

The levy limit deserves particular attention because it stops the unlegislated tax increase, in which rising values raise bills without anyone voting for it. Iowa enacted a 2 percent limit for cities and counties in 2026, with an allowance for new construction and a voter override, and North Carolina voters are deciding on November 3 whether to require one. Here in Virginia, existing relief includes exemptions and locally administered programs for qualifying elderly and disabled homeowners, but a broader income-based circuit breaker available to lower-income homeowners regardless of age deserves consideration by our legislature. States that want to go further should pay for relief openly from state revenue and should remember that reimbursements can shift back to localities when budgets tighten. Reform should cut the burden on the middle class, not merely move it to the family that rents down the street.

Common Sense: What a Real Compromise Would Look Like

Neither party has all of the answers, and as usual both will need to be in the room to come up with the solutions. Democrats have the stronger recent argument on who bears the cost of cuts and on revenue. Republicans have the stronger argument on incentives, on the limits of rate increases, and on the plain fact that health and retirement programs are the long-term drivers of the debt, as the Tax Foundation correctly notes. A deal has to ask something significant of each side, and the 3 percent deficit target already has support from both parties, including Secretary Bessent, so the destination is less contested than the politics suggest.

I will not tell anyone how to vote, and I would be disappointed if anyone read this as an instruction. What I would tell a young person is this. When a claim about the economy reaches you, ask five questions. Over what period? Compared to what? Which taxes, and which income? Who published it, and what do they want? And what would have happened anyway? A candidate who cannot survive those five questions has earned your skepticism, whichever color the yard sign may be.

As for the couple who started all of this, I hope they will pull out these charts, argue happily, and discover that each of them is about half right. The economy has done better under Democrats, Republicans have a real point about incentives, and the bill for both parties’ promises is now arriving at a table where their children are sitting. Facts will not end that conversation, but they will make it a better one, and it is my firm opinion that we need to be having more significant tax and economic policy conversations…and more in person and real life conversations period.

A Reading List for the Kitchen Table

Start with the two pieces most likely to be read by both spouses.

• Frankel, The Historical Puzzle of US Economic Performance (short and plain)
• Blinder and Watson, Presidents and the US Economy (the rigorous version, which also explains why luck matters)
• Tax Foundation, Who Pays Federal Income Taxes paired with ITEP, Who Pays Taxes in America (one from each side of the aisle, on the same question)
• CBO, The Distribution of Household Income, 2022 (nonpartisan, with charts)
• Presidential Data and the JEC paper (useful charts from an openly partisan vantage point)
• Investopedia on trickle-down theory (a primer)

Sources

Economy by party: JEC Democrats, October 2024 · Presidential Data and its data tables, August 2024 · Frankel, Belfer Center, March 2024 · Economic Policy Institute · Blinder and Watson, American Economic Review, 2016.

Debt: 24/7 Wall St. via Yahoo Finance, October 31, 2026 · Tax Foundation, McBride, December 2025 · Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, February 2026 · Bloomberg Opinion, November 2, 2026.

Reaganomics: Stubbs, Georgetown Law Denny Center, May 2024 · Yergin and Stanislaw, Commanding Heights · PolitiFact, June 2012 · Hope and Limberg, LSE, 2020.

Taxes: Chodorow-Reich, Zidar and Zwick, 2024 · CBO, Distribution of Household Income, 2022, January 2026 · Tax Foundation on CBO data, April 2026 · Thomson Reuters on CBO’s distributional letter, August 2025 · Balkir, Saez, Yagan and Zucman, NBER, 2025 · ITEP, April 2024 · Tax Foundation, Durante, October 2026 · Equitable Growth, January 2024.

Social Security and small business: 2026 OASDI Trustees Report, Conclusion · NBER business cycle dates · Marschall, The Arithmetic of 2032, July 2026 · Marschall, Lifting the Bottom of the K, July 2026.

Property taxes: National Association of Counties, October 2026 · Tax Foundation, Fox, on Amendment 3 and on 2026 ballot measures, October 2026.

This article is provided for general educational purposes and does not constitute tax, legal or investment advice. The opinions are my own. Projections reflect published estimates as of early November 2026 and will change with the economy and with legislation.

Jessica Irving Marschall, CPA

Marschall Accounting Services, LLC · marschalltax.com