Appropriations Committee chair Robert Byrd (D-WV) stated yesterday that he is postponing markups of the Interior-Environment and Legislative Branch FY 2009 appropriations bill and a second supplemental bill. The announcement to push off the supplemental comes a week after Bryd announced July 10 that he planned to markup the measure July 24. His reluctance to move Interior-Environment is similar to that of House Appropriations Committee chair David Obey's (D-WI) -- uncertainty about their ability to block Republican-backed oil and gas drilling provisions that would be tacked on to the bill.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has released a new report discussing the oft-cited, and completely false claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. Even though this statement has been refuted many times, by CBPP, by outside academics, and even by President Bush's own Treasury Department, the claim continues to float around. CBPP does a nice job hammering home the facts again about the impact of tax cuts in a very digestible brief:

The office in charge of overseeing employment practices of the Executive is a complete mess.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued a pair of data sets indicating that workers are still not seeing real (i.e. inflation adjusted) increases in pay. Yesterday's Real Earnings report, based on data from the payroll reports of private nonfarm establishments of earnings of both full-time and part-time workers holding production or nonsupervisory jobs, shows: Real average weekly earnings fell by 0.9 percent from May to June after