Blogs

The Obama Administration is now considering a new set of tax cuts, primarily aimed at businesses, to further stimulate the economy. It's reported that a permanent extension of the research and experimentation tax credit is one of these new proposals. …

The federal budget consists of three broad categories: discretionary spending, mandatory spending, and interest payments on the public debt. Congress decides each year how much funding it will provide for discretionary programs. Mandatory spending, on the other hand, is generally…

New federal budget projections paint an alarming picture of the need for Washington to set better priorities and resist the temptation to dig the government into even deeper trouble with more deficit-financed spending and tax cuts. (more…)

One of my Concord colleagues recently relayed the following "old joke" to me, remarking that a fiscal policy issue we had been discussing reminded him of it. But when he said it, it reminded me instead of a different fiscal…

Since Medicare will put far more pressure on the federal budget than Social Security will in the future, some people question whether the country really needs to worry about Social Security reform. Yes, we do. As Diane Lim Rogers, Concord’s…

Good news comes and goes rather quickly in the 2010 Medicare Trustees’ Report. It begins with the optimistic news that Medicare’s finances have improved substantially as a result of this year’s health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act (ACA).…

Returning briefly from its summer recess, the House of Representatives today approved a bill that would spend $26 billion to ease state budgetary woes. The Senate passed the measure last week. This money would be used to prevent budget cuts…

Social Security’s contribution to the overall fiscal gap over the coming decades is smaller than Medicare’s, as the program’s trustees have again made clear in their annual report. If Social Security contributes so much less to the fiscal gap than Medicare, some…