The Latest

During budget negotiations in the coming weeks, Congress should ensure that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has sufficient funding to effectively enforce the tax laws and improve taxpayer assistance and education services. This would allow the federal government to actually…

Many politicians and members of the public who are frustrated with the inability of Congress and the president to make responsible fiscal choices have proposed a seemingly simple solution:  Amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget. While the sentiment…

When The Concord Coalition was founded in 1992, the national debt was on a sharp upward trajectory. Yet just five years later, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed legislation passed by a Republican Congress that implemented the first balanced budget in…

This past Saturday marked 20 years since President Bill Clinton signed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA). The act was the result of an agreement with the Republican-controlled Congress designed to balance the budget by 2002. (more…)

The Concord Coalition warned today that the latest attacks on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) threaten to destroy its ability to provide policymakers and the public with nonpartisan, impartial analysis. After months of denigrating CBO, some members of Congress are…

Every year the trustees of Social Security and Medicare issue detailed reports on the financial status of these programs. While the trustees’ reports consistently warn that both programs face serious shortfalls, the urgency of this warning is often undercut by…

Social Security is the largest program in the federal budget, accounting for almost 24 cents out of every dollar spent by the government in 2016. The program consists of two main components: Old Age and Survivors Insurance, which provides benefits…

Health care programs are the largest and fastest growing in the federal budget. These programs include Medicare (providing health insurance for older Americans), Medicaid (providing health insurance for lower-income Americans), the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for individuals to…