The Latest

Last week the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released provisional birth data for 2020.(1)  Most of the media coverage focused on the fact that the number of births (3.6 million) was the lowest since 1979, and the general fertility…

Earlier this week the US Census Bureau released the “Apportionment Results” from the latest decennial census conducted in 2020.[1] These results provide a count of the resident population for the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as…

On Thursday, the Department of Commerce released its preliminary estimate of U.S. gross domestic product for the first quarter of 2021. Real GDP grew 1.6 percent over the previous quarter (2020 Q4), fueled by federal stimulus payments and an aggressive…

President Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan is noteworthy for two things. First, it greatly expands the definition of “infrastructure,” and second, it’s eight years of proposed spending is designed to be paid for with increased corporate taxes over 15…

After a one-week delay, on April 9th, the Biden administration finally released a peek at their FY 2022 budget. In it, the president proposes to spend $1.5 trillion on base (regular) discretionary programs next fiscal year, an increase of $118…

On this Good Friday, the March jobs report was indeed good. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs last month, vastly exceeding consensus expectations of 675,000, and almost double the gain of the previous…

For understandable reasons, the focus in Washington over the past year has been on the nation’s physical health, and its resulting consequences for the near-term economy, rather than on our longer-term fiscal health. A new report by the Government Accountability…

Sequestration is making headlines once again in Washington as federal lawmakers work quickly to avoid untimely reductions in Medicare reimbursements to healthcare providers – in the middle of a viral pandemic. And if one sequester wasn’t enough trouble, Congress must…