Appropriations

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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more news

Labor-HHS To Be Linked To MilCon-VA

Nov 1, 2007 by Matt Lewis

CQ is reporting that congressional negotiators have agreed to a joint Labor/HHS-MilCon/VA bill. The House will likely vote on Tuesday, and the Senate Wednesday. The Department of Defense appropriations bill is no longer part of the package.

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In-Appropriate: Veto-Happy Bush Castigates Congress

Oct 31, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Who's Wasting Whose Time Here? At a GOP rally at the White House yesterday, President Bush took the opportunity to have another tantrum, again threatening to veto a congressional appropriations proposal, the latest in a series of nearly a dozen such veto threats: Congress is not getting its work done... We're near the end of the year, and there really isn't much to show for it... I believe [Congress] is wasting valuable time. Or could it be that Congress, being forced to negotiate with itself because Bush refuses to negotiate, is having its time wasted?

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Your Money's No Good Here

Oct 30, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Via our very own RegWatch, a commissioner of the Consumer Products Safety Commission is lobbying against a proposed budget increase.

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Stupid Fiscal Policy Tricks; See the President Perform!

Oct 30, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Deficits Disappear! Vetoes without Votes! Budget Bombast! Some seriously silly circus tricks are on daily display this Halloween season as three-ring leader President Bush pushes the bounds of credulity, for a man who has single-handedly added over $3,000,000,000,000.00 (three tril) to the national debt. His biggest and most mendacious trick is a sleight-of-hand to convince the children of the jury that the spending bills passed by the House, and sometimes the Senate, are budget-busting veto bait, exceeding his $730 billion in requests by around $20 billion.

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The Spying Budget, Declassified, Partially

Oct 30, 2007 by Matt Lewis

We did $50 billion worth of spying last year, according to the Washington Post today. The director of national intelligence will disclose today that national intelligence activities amounting to roughly 80 percent of all U.S. intelligence spending for the year cost more than $40 billion, according to sources on Capitol Hill and inside the administration. The disclosure means that when military spending is added, aggregate U.S. intelligence spending for fiscal 2007 exceeded $50 billion, according to these sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the total remains classified.

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He Wouldn't Veto That, Would He?

Oct 30, 2007 by Matt Lewis

The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports that there's a new budget strategy- tie the Defense, Veterans Administration, AND Labor/HHS/educaction bills together, and send them to the president. The package, which combines three bills into one, would total almost $675 billion in discretionary spending for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Of this, more than 70% is defense-related. The rest is expected to incorporate about $14 billion more for domestic priorities than Mr. Bush has requested.

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Boehner Believes

Oct 26, 2007 by Craig Jennings

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) believes ($) in the Great Pumpkin.

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Transparency

Oct 26, 2007 by Craig Jennings

You don't even have to read between the lines to understand that the president is opposed to providing health insurance to children. ...I was disappointed by what Congress had been doing...This week, the majority in the House passed a new SCHIP bill that costs more over the next five years than the one I vetoed three weeks ago. It still moves millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care. It raises taxes to pay for it.

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Conservatives Prevent Veto-Proof Vote on SCHIP

Oct 25, 2007 by Matt Lewis

The House got a little closer to the veto-proof 2/3rds majority today, but in the end conservatives basically blocked the bill once again. The vote was 265-142 (roll call). SCHIP supporters made a bunch of concessions around program eligibility. What gives? I guess these hyper-conservatives just don't want to spend more money on kids in particular, because we all know they'll throw away hundreds of billions for wars that are going nowhere.

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Hey Big Spender?

Oct 25, 2007 by Matt Lewis

There's a myth out there that President Bush is a "big spender." If anything, he's a tax cutter and a stable spender on the macrolevel. Take a look at this chart, via Econospeak. Or maybe he's just a budget shifter. Here's a chart on defense and domestic discretionary spending by EPI: That domestic spending includes homeland security, which has seen huge increases. The share of GDP going to non-defense domestic discretionary programs has fallen from 3.4 percent in 2001 to 3.1 percent in 2007.

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