The House passed a number of tax bills yesterday. In total, they voted to trim $94.5 billion from federal revenue over five years. As Concord Coalition executive director Robert Bixby aptly put it in this Washington Post article, "I don't think it makes any sense to go through all the difficulty they just went through with the budget-cutting bill, then give it all back in tax cuts. If they want to cut taxes, fine, but they are going to have to cut spending by at least that much to help the deficit, and clearly they are not willing to do that. They have to start looking reality in the face."

The reconciliation process Congress is currently still entangled in was laid out in the budget resolution to include three components: one cutting the budget, one cutting taxes, and the third increasing the debt limit. It appears now that Congress will delay increasing the debt limit until February 2006.

PART, the government performance rating tool which is run out of the Office of Management and Budget, rates government programs based both on their purpose and their results (as deemed by the OMB). The OMB, part of the executive branch, then recommends cuts for programs based on these results, however research has shown that these recommendations often have very little to do with how effective the programs were rated.

The country's businesses added 215,000 jobs in November, according to a report released this morning by the Labor Department. This increase is more than the average monthy gains for the first eight months of 2005 (196,000) and follows two months of disappointingly low gains following the hurricanes along the Gulf Coast.