Spending Transparency

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

Entitlement Options

Jan 18, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Ben Bernanke gave testimony on increasing entitlement program costs today. There was one key point I wanted to discuss: Addressing the country's fiscal problems will take persistence and a willingness to make difficult choices. In the end, the fundamental decision that the Congress, the Administration, and the American people must confront is how large a share of the nation's economic resources to devote to federal government programs, including transfer programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

read in full

PAYGO at Work

Jan 18, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) wants to attach an $8 billion small business tax cut provision to a Senate minimum wage hike bill, because, as he claims, a "clean" minimum wage bill would not sustain a Republican filibuster.

read in full

Income Inequality Continues Apace

Jan 18, 2007 by Craig Jennings

The latest EPI Snapshot presents yet more data points on the trend in rising inequality. Lawrence Marshall and Jared Bernstein describe two notable measures of inequality growth: (1) The share of corporate income going to the owners of capital The most recent data (third quarter of 2006) reveal that owners of capital received 23.0% of all corporate income, the highest share since 1966. That means that the compensation of employees was at the lowest share in over 25 years. and (2) the share of capital income going to the top 1% of the income scale

read in full

Bush's Balanced Balance Bid: Heavy Lifting or Laughing?

Jan 16, 2007 by Dana Chasin

While we await his State of the Union speech and the Bush budget for FY2008, the media focus remains fixed, oddly, on the President's pledge last week that, despite his profligate past, he will balance the federal budget by 2012. As we and others have suggested, this pledge shouldn't be taken seriously. A Washington Post article today on the topic asserts that "the politically perilous work of making that happen -- cutting spending or raising taxes -- falls to the Democratic-run Congress."

read in full

Senators Broach Fiscal and Entitlement Reform Initiative

Jan 11, 2007 by Dana Chasin

We last left the subject of budget and entitlement reform in 2006 (here and here) amid muted congressional response to bids by OMB Director Rob Portman and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to discuss concrete solutions.

read in full

Is the Sky Falling?

Jan 11, 2007 by Matt Lewis

GAO Chief David M. Walker plays budget Cassandra in a report to the Senate Budget Committee today. You can read the report here

read in full

Baucus Nearing Completion on "Trifecta Lite"

Jan 11, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) is putting the finishing touches on a minimum wage bill that also cuts taxes for small businesses. Even though the House overwhelmingly passed a clean minimum wage bill, Baucus says the $10 billion in proposed tax breaks are needed to offset the hardship a higher minimum wage might impose on small businesses

read in full

House Passes Long-Overdue Minimum Wage Raise

Jan 10, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Alright! By a wide margin (312 to 116), the House just passed a raise in the minimum wage. No Democrats voted against it, and 82 Republicans voted for it, even though it had no other "sweetening" provisions, such as tax breaks for businesses. The ball is now in the Senate's court.

read in full

Sen. Baucus Taken to Task in Washington Post

Jan 10, 2007 by Adam Hughes*

Steven Pearlstein, the business columnists for the Washington Post, has a blistering expose on Sen. Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) in today's paper. Pearlstein wonders how (or perhaps why?) Sen. Baucus was able to work his way to the top of the Democrats' list to lead the Finance Committee when many if not all of his views on committee business are essentially contrary to the Democratic Party platform. A few excerpts:

read in full

WaPo's Samuelson Needlessly Freaks Out About Social Security

Jan 10, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Robert Samuelson bashes his generation in today’s Washington Post: Shame on us [baby boomers]. We are trying to rob our children and grandchildren, putting the country's future at risk in the process. On one of the great issues of our time, the social and economic costs of our retirement, we have adopted a policy of selfish silence. *Sigh* What is Samuelson so exercised about? He’s huffing and puffing over something that may or may not happen 33 years from now.

read in full