News Briefs

The Wall Street Journal reports that House Speaker Paul Ryan will announce in a speech today that he is still confident that Congress can enact comprehensive tax reform in 2017. However, Republican efforts to pass tax reform face significant hurdles, including disagreement on the substance of the tax reform and the need to first pass both healthcare reform and a federal budget. WSJ

Jason Furman and Rohit Kumar argue in an op-ed that the federal debt limit should be repealed because it no longer effectively constrains how much the government can spend. The authors argue that the debt limit is hardly ever observed and that brinksmanship over its extension is harmful to the U.S. economy and raises borrowing costs for the federal government. WSJ