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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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$250 Billion FY2006 Deficit: Cause and Effect

Oct 11, 2006 by Matthew Madia

To follow up on Matt's discussion below of the final deficit figures for FY2006, I thought I'd point to some of the wildly disparate explanations offered for it. Says Speaker Hastert, whose credibility right now is not exactly at an all-time high: "Republicans have cut the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule because they know that tax relief fuels America's economy." President Bush added a corollary last night: "Do we keep taxes low so we can keep this economy growing, or do we let the Democrats in Washington raise taxes and hurt the economic vitality of this country?"

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Bush Celebrates $250 Billion Deficit

Oct 11, 2006 by Matthew Madia

President Bush on the Treasury's announcement that the FY 2006 budget deficit is $248 billion: First, I want to briefly mention that today we've released the actual budget numbers for the fiscal year that ended on September the 30th. These numbers show that we have now achieved our goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half, and we've done it three years ahead of schedule.

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CBO's Final FY2006 Deficit Estimate: $250 Billion

Oct 6, 2006 by Adam Hughes*

The final CBO FY 2006 deficit estimate numbs are in … at a cool quarter of a trillion dollars. The $250 billion figure released today is well under CBO’s estimate of $337 billion at the beginning of the year and the $318 billion actual deficit for FY2005. Until this summer, the deficit projections were uniformly in the $300 billion-range, but a late surge in corporate income helped boost FY2006 revenues by $253 billion over last year’s total.

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Bernanke on Budget Cuts

Oct 5, 2006 by Matt Lewis

Another sign that the Bush Administration may push for "entitlement reform" (read: massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) after the election. From CongressDaily ($$):

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The Other Public Interest

Oct 2, 2006 by Matthew Madia

Shorter Sebastian Mallaby: Democrats have no principles because they won't cut Social Security for married low-income people. Snark aside, I bring this up because Mallaby and many of the entitlement-reform-obsessives around Washington are missing the point about fast-growing government spending. The fastest growing part of the budget are interest payments on the national debt. For more, Daniel Gross has a great article in Sunday's NYT explaining why interest payments have taken off.

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The Many Numbers of the Budget Deficit

Sep 29, 2006 by Matthew Madia

Kevin G. Hall, writing for McClatchy, does a nice job of describing the tricksyness with which federal budget numbers are bandied about. From the voice of Pollyanna to that of the bard of the Apocalypse, St. John, talk of the budget elicits a whole range of degrees of concern. To wit: Pollyanna:

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It's the Deficit, Stupid

Sep 29, 2006 by Matthew Madia

Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute testified at a Senate Finance Hearing on Tuesday. Essentially, Edwards argued that the federal government has a "spending problem." Increased spending, he said, is almost entirely responsible for the last 5 years of high deficits. Therefore, we ought to get to the root of the problem and cut back on spending to get the deficit under contol. This is the same tack that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-NH) has taken while advocating for drastic budget cuts.

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Joint Economic Committee Decries Income Inequality

Sep 22, 2006 by Craig Jennings

Although today's Joint Economic Committee press release was intended to bemoan the absolutely crushing burden of income taxes paid by the top 50% of income earners which has stymied all attempts to get this economy moving [/sarcasm], it actually underscores a troubling trend in income distribution. According to the new data, the top half of taxpayers ranked by income paid 96.70 percent of the individual income taxes paid in 2004, compared to 86.05 percent in 1949, 89.35 percent in 1959, and 90.27 percent in 1969.

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The Daily Opportunity Cost of Interest Expense

Sep 21, 2006 by Matthew Madia

According to the House Budget Committee Democratic Caucus' Materials for Five-Minute Speeches on the Budget, released Tuesday, federal government spending on publicly held debt is $504 million every single day. What could we do with today's worth of interest expense alone, if we didn't owe it to our creditors? We could:

hire 8,930 new airport security agents
increase the solvency of Social Security by half a billion dollars
give every college freshman $342 in tuition assistance
provide full health care benefots to 71,479 more veterans

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Accounting Secrets: The Deficit Unmasked

Sep 19, 2006 by Matthew Madia

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN)’s article in Roll Call today points out that “The Financial Report of the United States,” a document so embarrassing to the While House that it published only 2,100 copies this year, reveals a true accounting of the deficit -— one that encompasses veterans’ benefits, civil service retirement, Social Security, and Medicare. Cooper notes that a partial unmasking of the true extent of the nation’s financial condition was mandated this summer, when:

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