A lot of people hate Tax Day. Filling out tax forms is drudgery, and being forced to pay cash to the IRS is painful, especially since the taxes fund so many wasteful activities. Taxes are not the price of a civilized society as liberals claim, but the price of a government cluttered with failed and harmful programs.

Presidential candidate Rand Paul has announced his support for a balanced-budget amendment (BBA) to the U.S. Constitution. This is an old idea, but a good idea. A BBA has been proposed in Congress as far back as 1936. In 1982 the Senate passed a BBA by a vote of 69-31, but it failed to get the needed two-thirds approval in the House. In 1995 a BBA passed the House by a 300-132 margin, but it fell one vote short of passage in the Senate.

Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi released his budget proposal yesterday afternoon. The request follows yesterday’s proposal from House Budget Chairman Tom Price. The two requests are similar. Both would reduce projected spending by $5 trillion and balance the federal budget over the next ten years. Both budgets repeal ObamaCare, and neither includes reforms to Social Security. The big difference between the two is that the Senate version is even vaguer than the House version.

The financial press has become inundated with the word “austerity.” Since Greece’s left-wing Syriza proclaimed an “anti-austerity revolution,” strong adjectives, like “incredibly savage,” precede that overused word.

ObamaCare gives states the option to expand Medicaid to cover all individuals below 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which is approximately $33,500 a year for a family of four. To encourage states to expand, the federal government agreed to fund 100 percent of expenditures for the newly-eligible participants until 2016, and then slowly decrease the match to 90 percent in 2020 and into the future.

In recent decades, the Democratic Party has moved far to the left on economic policy. I have discussed the leftward shift on tax policy, which was illustrated once again by President Obama’s generally awful proposals in his new budge

One of the largest and fastest growing items in President Obama’s new budget is often overlooked. Net interest expenses will skyrocket over the next decade, growing by 250 percent.

The president released his budget request this morning. As expected, his plan is heavy on new spending and new taxes, and very light on structural reforms.

President Obama’s economic policies always seem to be a zero-sum proposition with winners and losers. Usually the losers are all Americans, who suffer from slower economic growth.

The House of Representatives voted this week to establish rules for the 114th Congress. One rule change requires that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) dynamically score legislation. The change is a much-needed reform to the federal budgeting process.