Blog: The Fine Print / Revenue & Spending

Budget Resolution Process: Views and Estimates

Feb 27, 2007 by Dana Chasin

This week, the House and Senate authorizing committees start drafting their "Views and Estimates" letters, conveying their positions on the President's FY 2008 budget provisions for the programs that fall under their jurisdiction. The committees must submit their letters to their respective budget committees no later than six weeks after the president's budget release, this year, March 19. The budget committees may, however, request a given authorizing committee to submit its letter by an earlier date.

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War Funding Proposal Evades Critical Questions

Feb 27, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Rep. David Wu and Bruce Ackerman have an interesting proposal on war funding. They want to put a cap on the total amount of funding for the Iraq war. It is Congress's job to restore fiscal balance first, by placing an overall limit on Iraq war expenditures. Congress should limit this president to spending half a trillion dollars on the Iraq war -- and no more.

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Next Step for FY 2008: Budget Resolution

Feb 26, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Over the course of the five-week congressional "work period," a major fiscal focus will be the FY 2008 budget resolution. Below is the current congressional timetable for the budget resolution -- a roadmap Congress uses to plan out the budget for the year setting out changes on entitlement programs and taxes.

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The Fiscal Gap: Terrible

Feb 26, 2007 by Matt Lewis

The fiscal gap is an awful way to measure and think about the budget's long-term fiscal imbalance. I don't know why, but GAO likes it. They gave a rundown of what the fiscal gap is in a report released on Friday. The fiscal gap is the amount of spending reduction or tax increases needed to keep debt as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) at or below today's ratio. Another way to say this is that the fiscal gap is the amount of change needed to prevent the kind of debt explosion implicit in figure 3.

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President Promotes Health Care Tax Package

Feb 26, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Merrill Goozner informs us that the President talked up his health care tax initiative on Saturday. Seems like he's not going to let this one drop, but we'll see.

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WSJ: AMT fix "an excuse to [repeal] Bush tax cuts"

Feb 26, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The Wall Street Journal published a particularly useless, factually-selective, poorly-argued partisan skreed last Friday about "how the AMT's relentless expansion in recent years is [the fault of] none other than William Jefferson Clinton" and how the AMT ("one more liberal monster that was created in the name of soaking the rich") has become "an excuse to justify repealing the Bush tax cuts." The bottom-line warning of the (by-line-less) Journal piece:

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Media Coverage of FedSpending.org v2.0

Feb 23, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

The updated version of FedSpending.org has garnered a few media hits in papers and blogs around the country. Below is a bit of the coverage:
  • GovExec.com story
  • San Fransico Examiner editorial
  • Mark Tapscott's Blog
  • Sunlight Foundation Blog

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More Americans Becoming Severely Poor

Feb 23, 2007 by Craig Jennings

McClatchy reports today on a study of 2005 census figures which found that "the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period." The McClathy article also draws on other studies to underline its point - that severe poverty, not just poverty, is growing and growing at an alarming rate.

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CBO Puts Tax Policy Options on the Table

Feb 23, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Today, CBO released its biennial set of policy options, "to help policymakers in their annual tasks of making budgetary choices, setting priorities, and adapting to changing circumstances." Some of the options seem particularly fiscally favorable, politically feasible, and equitable, among them:
  • OPTION 17 -- Include All Income Earned Abroad by U.S. Citizen in Taxable Income. (5-year savings: $22.9 billion; 10-year savings: $57 billion)
  • OPTION 24 -- Set the Corporate Tax Rate at 35 Percent for All Corporations. (5-year savings: $13.2 billion; 10-year savings: $27.6 billion)

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Mitigating Globalization-Generated Wage Stagnation

Feb 23, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The American Prospect's Harold Myerson has a op-ed piece in that publication today, Can Free Trade Be a Fair Deal?. In the op-ed, he links American middle class wage stagnation to globalization, specifically, to global wage convergence. The one policy proposal he offers seems paradoxical. For what would the global minimum wage policy he advocates do but hasten global wage convergence? At the same time, he rejects the proposals offered by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his fellow Hamiltonians at Brookings

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