#Federal Budget

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…

Today we updated our "Plausible Baseline" to take into account the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)'s latest Budget and Economic Analysis.Our press release, "Concord Coalition Says CBO Report Shows Need to Re-examine Fiscal Priorities," is here. (more…)

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…

Defense Secretary Robert Gates forged ahead this week with more cost-cutting and efficiency efforts at the Pentagon, providing a good example for other government leaders to set better budget priorities. Some of the measures he announced Monday have enough bite,…

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…

WASHINGTON----With the 2010 Social Security and Medicare Trustees’ Report scheduled to be released on Thursday, The Concord Coalition today urged lawmakers, the president’s fiscal commission and the public to focus on the report’s projected cost growth of the two largest…

Lollipops became an unexpected point of contention as the President’s fiscal commission turned its attention to Social Security. Barry Anderson, who has been head of budgeting at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said he passed them out to…

Below are several developments we have been following since the last edition of the Washington Budget Report (sign up here) was published. (more…)