#Federal Budget

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…

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…

WASHINGTON -- The Concord Coalition today called new federal budget projections an alarming reminder 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…

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…

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…

If President Obama was looking for Congress to rubber-stamp his request for additional “emergency” funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, he was sorely disappointed. He asked for the money last February but a wary Congress didn’t…

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…