Blog: The Fine Print / Revenue & Spending

Student Loans Get The Kinsley Treatment

Sep 17, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Michael Kinsley has a great article on the student loan "industry"- another example of privatization that costs more money than when the government does it itself (other examples include Medicare Advantage and the IRS private debt collection program). Behold the power of private enterprise and all its efficiency.

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President's Budget Toys with Consumer Safety

Sep 17, 2007 by Craig Jennings

So if $22 billion isn't really that much, then why shouldn't Congress just give in to the president's stubbornness and limit discretionary spending to his $933 "top line?" Congress and all Americans should care because even though $22 billion is but a sliver of the whole federal budget, a fraction of that sliver can have an enormous impact on the safety and health of hundreds of thousands of children.

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Tell Congress To Pass Bill To Give More Kids Health Care!

Sep 14, 2007 by Matt Lewis

1-866-544-7573. That's the toll-free number you can call to urge your representatives in Congress to pass an expansion of SCHIP and Medicare reforms (for more on the House and Senate versions of the bill, read this Watcher article). Negotiations over those bills have stalled, and it's vital that Congress hear that they need to pass the most progressive expansion ppossible before the program's authorization expires on September 30th.

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Approps Update

Sep 14, 2007 by Craig Jennings

On Wednesday, the Senate overwhelming approved (88-7) a 104.6 billion Transportation-HUD bill. It's discretionary total, $51.1 billion, drew the expected veto threat from the White House. The President objects to, among other provisons:
  • Increased funding for the Federal Highway Administration
  • $1 billion funding increase for Community Development Block Grant
  • $600 funding increase for housing vouchers
The Senate Appropriations committee also approved this week a $460 billion defense spending bill. Ticktock, ticktock... September 14, 2007 House Senate

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State Budget Woes

Sep 14, 2007 by Matt Lewis

More evidence that state budgets are facing new pressures, and that budget cuts have consequences, from David Sirota: Thanks to budget cuts, Colorado's DMV is now totally understaffed. In 2003, the agency was forced to shut down 25 facilities. Those that remain are chronically overburdened. As the Colorado Springs Gazette reports, lines "are so long that people report spending all day at a driver's license office." But that is just where it starts.

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Congressional Congestion, Calendar Constraints, and a Continuing Resolution

Sep 13, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Take nine unfinished Senate appropriations bills, throw in twelve unscheduled conference negotiations, add a handful of presidential veto threats thus far and counting, and count at most a dozen legislative days until the end of the 2007 fiscal year. You do the math -- it equals at least one continuing resolution (CR). Most discussions center around a CR that would give Congress until Nov. 9 or 16 to complete work on the FY 2008 budget. Without a stopgap agreement by Oct. 1, government agencies could not operate at full strength after the start of the new fiscal year.

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GOP Rethinking Tax Cuts As Solution To Everything Imaginable

Sep 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

At Womenstake, Christina Martin-Firvada reports on how the GOP is finding that tax cuts are going out of style. In case you do not follow this sort of thing, it's Fashion Week in New York,that magical time twice yearly when vanity wrestles good sense to the ground and hogties it to the latest impossible trend. (How do you feel about shoes designed to look too small?).

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Unions Improve Low-Wage Work

Sep 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

From Inclusion and CEPR, a great report on how unions can raise incomes and benefits for low-wage workers. Unionized workers in low-wage jobs made 16 percent more than non-unionized workers, and were 25 percent more likely to get health insurance, and 25 percent more likely to get a pension. And that matters a lot: These union effects are large by any measure. To put these findings into perspective, between 1996 and 2000, a period of sustained, low unemployment that helped to produce the best wage growth

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Carried Interest -- Humor from the Street

Sep 13, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Below are bits from recent pieces from the belly of the beast -- the depths of the corporate canyon at the lower end of Manhattan, where lies (damn lies) Wall Street -- with telling arguments regarding carried interest. Both are scary, both are funny (tho only one intentionally so).

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Econo-think

Sep 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Martin Feldstein is resigning as the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which as I understand is the commanding heights of the economics profession. To get your head around how he and his peers think, take a look at this excerpt from an address he wrote a few months ago: So economic policy changes occur as the ideas of the economics profession change and as those ideas become more widely diffused. By the late 1970s, many economists had abandoned their old Keynesian views as a result both of experience — especially the poor economic performance of the late 1960s and the

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