Federal Debt and Deficit

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

read in full

Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

read in full

Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

read in full

Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

read in full

more news

Approps Update

Jul 9, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Congress is back from its week-long July 4th vacation and will, among other things, try to get pass some more spending bills. This week in the House: Wednesday

Transportation-HUD is in full Appropriations Committee
Labor-HHS is in full Appropriations Committee

Thursday

Commerce-Justice-Science is in full Appropriations Committee
Energy-Water pork is divvied up by Appropriations Committee

Possible action sometime during the week

Defense is in subcommittee
Agriculture is in subcommittee

read in full

CBO's Monthly Budget Update - July 2007

Jul 9, 2007 by Craig Jennings

The federal government incurred a deficit of $123 billion for the first nine months of fiscal year 2007, CBO estimates, $83 billion less than the shortfall recorded during the same period in 2006. Revenues have risen by more than 7 percent, whereas outlays have grown by less than 3 percent. Both rates of growth are noticeably smaller than the rates of increase in fiscal years 2005 and 2006, which averaged about 13 percent for revenues and close to 8 percent for outlays. (click on CBO logo for report)

read in full

Weekend Reading: CBO Testimony on Health Care

Jun 22, 2007 by Matt Lewis

If you read anything policy-related this weekend, make sure it's Peter Orszag's testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. He gives a fair reading of the factors producing the explosion in health care costs.

read in full

Post Article Gives Praise Unto Walker

Jun 21, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Praise be budget nutcase David Walker. His Word is holy, and those who speak it become holy, i.e. writers for the Washington Post. Today's epistle expresses almost zero skepticism about any of Walker's claims about the "entitlement" crisis. It is not for the Washington Post to question the Word, though the author gets a little credit for including a paragraph with a quote from a heretic.

read in full

What is the President Smoking?

Jun 19, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

I stumbled across a copy of the president's weekly radio address this morning and, for the life of me, can't figure out what Mr. Bush is smoking. The address summarized Bush's record on fiscal policy, stating outrageous claims like the president's tax cuts were a success, that Bush has enacted fiscal discipline in Washington, and that government spending imperils economic growth. These statements are all pretty much wrong, but the worst part of the speech was this: Over the past three years, we have met the urgent needs of our Nation while holding the growth of annual domestic spending close to one percent - well below the rate of inflation...By keeping taxes low and restraining Federal spending, we can meet my plan to have a balanced budget by 2012. Let's take a look at how well the president has met the urgent needs of our nation. Just recently, we've come across the following reports:

New Hampshire may have to cut food and other assistance for the elderly;
Hunger in America could be significantly curtailed if we'd only invest a little more;
Backdoor cuts to Medicaid have drawn the ire of state Medicaid directors. Michigan is one state that has cut its Medicaid program;
Delays and insufficient funding in the FY 06 spending bills threatened cuts to veterans health care, the Social Security Administration, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Small Business Administration, the FBI and DEA, Amtrak, and low-income housing programs - all of which have been operating on shoestring budgets over the past several years;
The Walter Reed scandals appear to be a budget issue at its core with privatization of government services pursued to save money over delivering quality services;
A growing number of sinkholes are increasingly becoming a problem around the country - mostly due to underfunded or neglected federal wastewater management programs;
The Food and Drug Administration has largely blamed budget cuts and a lack of resources for their poor responses to recent food safety problems;
The Center for Disease Control stated last week they lacked funding to put a plan in place to respond to a large tuberculosis outbreak;
The president's own Millennium Challenge program, which provides funding to foster the development of poor countries, was running $400 million to $1 billion behind in January, 2007;
Even funding for Iraq reconstruction has been insufficient and mismanaged;

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg of unmet needs around the country the president doesn't even seem to be aware of. What's more, the president has presided over the largest increase in the national debt in history, as it has increased from $5.95 trillion to close to $9 trillion during his presidency. At this point, it's a little late for him to be shooting for a balanced budget in 2012 - 3 years after he leaves the White House. I'm afraid the damage has already been done.

read in full

More Meditations on the Hamilton Project

Jun 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

One last thought on the Hamilton Project- I believe they do not serve the cause of fighting inequality. Stay with me on this one. Take this statement: Industrial policies and direct market interventions can try to change the before-tax distribution of income. But ultimately such policies harm the economy—for example, excessively high living-wage laws can result in large job losses for low-skilled workers. Factually, I believe the statement is wrong. Government intervention in markets can promote the common good. Everything that's known about health care provision is a case in point.

read in full

Blue Dogs Seek to Seize Fiscal Responsibility Mantle

Jun 12, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

The Washington Post reports today that the Democratis Blue Dog Coalition plans to introduce legislation shortly to impose caps on some spending, enshrine pay-as-you-go rules in federal law and authorize automatic spending cuts to enforce them ... amend the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced budget and to create an array of budget provisions that would focus more attention on what it sees as pork-barrel spending.

read in full

Monthly Budget Review: June, 2007

Jun 7, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

CBO's Monthly Budget Review has been released: The federal government incurred a deficit of $152 billion during the first eight months of fiscal year 2007, CBO estimates, $75 billion less than the shortfall recorded through May of last year.

read in full

GAO Still Not Pleased With Long-Term Fiscal Outlook

Jun 4, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released the latest version of their "The Nation's Long-Term Fiscal Outlook" report today. As with previous reports, GAO finds little change in the long-term outlook and warns that current fiscal policies are unsustainable (duh!). Despite re-stating the important fact that current policies are unsustainable, the report also helps to distinguish what is driving long-term imbalances. Instead of lumping Social Security and Medicare together and labeling the problem as an "entitlement" one, the GAO report highlights health care costs generally as the major obstacle. The relevant paragraph from the report states: Although Social Security is a major part of the fiscal challenge, it is far from our biggest challenge. Spending on the major federal health programs (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid) represents a much larger and faster growing problem. In fact, the federal government's obligations for Medicare Part D alone exceed the unfunded obligations for Social Security. Over the past several decades, health care spending on average has grown much faster than the economy, absorbing increasing shares of the Nation's resources, and this rapid growth is projected to continue. For this reason and others, rising health care costs pose a fiscal challenge not just to the federal budget but to American business and our society as a whole. Under the leadership of Comptroller General David Walker, the GAO continues to bring an important and under appreciated voice to long-term fiscal policy debates. The short report is worth a read: GAO: The Nation's Long-Term Fiscal Outlook

read in full

Giving Equal Treatment to Work and Wealth

May 30, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday ($) on a plan in Congress to require private brokerage and financial companies to report the "basis" amount of securities that were sold in a given year. This plan was released last week by the Senate Finance committee and it is estimated that it will bring in $11 billion in unpaid capital gains taxes each year - a small, but substantial portion of the overall tax gap related to non-wage income. This is a straight-forward commons sense idea that would help to equalize the treatment of work and wealth in the U.S., at least within the IRS. Currently, payroll taxes (and to a large extent income taxes) are easily calculated directly by the IRS because employers are required to report the amount of income they pay their employees to the IRS. Because of this system, it is very difficult to cheat or make a mistake on your payroll or income taxes and easy for the IRS to catch you if you do (unless you are self-employed, in which case you are reporting your own income to the IRS). But there is no similar requirement for reporting of capital gains taxes (or loses). When individuals report their capital gains or losses, say, from selling shares of stock in a company, they need to calculate the difference between what they paid for the stock, and what they sold it for. The amount they paid for the stock is called the basis. It is much more difficult for the IRS to verify the individual has calculated their tax liability correctly because it does not receive confirmation of the basis for sales of stock and other securities. This plan would help prevent individuals from intentionally cheating or making a mistake in their capital gains and loses by providing the IRS with a way to check individual returns. It would require reporting requirements for income made from wealth to match the reporting requirements for income made from work. While the $11 billion per year brought into the government is actually a small amount compared to the overall tax gap, this proposal would collect sufficient revenues to pay for the entire SCHIP reauthoization bill being debated this year. There are no details on how soon the plan would be introduced as legislation, but with both Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA) supporting the plan, it is likely it will be broadly supported in the Senate.

read in full