President Obama’s 2014 budget arrived two months late and was declared DOA by the House GOP leadership days before they even saw it. Yet, it is full of items of interest, including a new millionaire tax and a renewed proposal to limit the value of tax preferences for high income households. But what about the [...]

There is an obvious solution to Washington’s perpetual budget crisis. But it is unlikely to happen because all the incentives—both political and economic—are completely wrong. First, the solution: The core of a deal was framed last December, when President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were on the verge of a long-term fiscal agreement that would have cut [...]

No surprise here, but the tax cuts in Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget plan would result in huge benefits for high-income people and very modest—or no— benefits for low income working households, according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center. TPC looked only at the tax reductions in Ryan’s plan, which also included offsetting–but unidentified–cuts [...]

It looks like Congress is about to assume its default position: In the face of an intractable partisan dispute over how to pay for a government initiative, don’t. If Democrats won’t cut spending, and Republicans refuse to raise anybody’s taxes, there is always the solution they both can agree upon—just borrow the money and increase [...]

The other day, I spent a few hours with some of Washington’s most experienced budget experts. The session was off-the-record, so I can’t tell you who they were but I can tell you what they said. In short, don’t count on much real deficit reduction any time soon, despite this summer’s debt limit deal that, [...]

The Senate’s bipartisan on again/off again Gang of Six has proposed an ambitious tax and spending package that closely follows the plan offered six months ago by the chairs of President Obama’s fiscal commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Their plan is not so much a budget as a framework. In some cases it is quite [...]

Apparently nostalgic for recession, more than 100 House Republicans have proposed to cut federal spending by $550 billion in 2012. The Republican Study Committee (RSC) doesn’t ever quite say this is their plan, but it is. One hardly knows where to begin. This is an amazing number. It implies a 15 percent reduction in government spending [...]

Will Donald Trump bring Barack Obama’s birth certificate to the Royal wedding? I have no idea, but now that I’ve made our Web optimization folks happy, here is another question: What’s the deal with the People’s Budget, the fiscal plan released this week by 80 congressional progressives? The answer is likely to drive less traffic than [...]

So it has come to this: The biggest short-term risk of the U.S. defaulting on its sovereign debt is not that big spenders will have their way. Rather, it is that a relative handful of self-styled fiscal conservatives succeed in throwing the country into financial crisis by refusing to raise the nation’s debt limit. It [...]

If you view a budget as a vision of government, the House GOP’s fiscal map unveiled today charts a profound course correction for Washington and its relationships with both its citizens and the states. In this new world, individuals and families would receive only limited assistance from government in times of stress, but they also might [...]