In February, Congress was barely able to raise the federal government's debt ceiling to allow Uncle Sam to continue borrowing. The votes, which occurred along strict partisan lines, only provided the government with one year's worth of additional borrowing capacity. With a new wave of conservative lawmakers on the way to Capitol Hill in January, will commitments to dogmatic principles by a majority of new members prevent the government from meeting its debt obligations?

In a report released last week, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) revised the total cost of permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts to $5.048 trillion over the next ten years. The revised amount, which is significantly higher than the $2.8 trillion figure CRS reported in September, takes into account the cost of servicing the debt due to lost revenue and indexing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) to inflation.*

Last Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their last Monthly Budget Review (MBR) for the fiscal year. So how much debt did Uncle Sam rack up in 2010, you ask. Well, just under $1.3 trillion. This figure is $50 billion less than what CBO projected just last month and is "$125 billion less than the shortfall recorded in 2009." Everyone say, "Hooray" for deficit reduction.

In their newly released, talking-point-heavy "Pledge to America," House Republicans say they are offering "a plan to stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of government" if voters put them back in charge in November. One area of government the plan doesn't call for reducing, however, is the Department of Defense (DOD). In fact, the new conservative governing proposal explicitly exempts the DOD budget from their proposed cuts to bring federal spending back to "pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels."