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No wonder Nancy Pelosi and the White House are bursting with glee. The budget deal is the biggest spending blitz in years. Let's start with an amazing and depressing statistic. Federal spending in 2016 was already expected to climb by more than $250 billion — or close to $1 billion extra spending each day. This was to be a 6% rise in outlays in a year when inflation is running at slightly less than 2%. But the budget deal adds to the orgy of spending. The plan raises spending by at least $100 billion over two years and busts through...

I posted this in another thread but I would like to know (besides the obvious reason of (R) cowardice) why this plan wouldn't work? 1.) The House passes a budget that defunds amnesty, defunds PP, defunds the Iran deal, defunds Obamacare. 2.) The Senate attempts to vote on it. 3.) The Democrats filibuster. 4.) The deadline passes. 5.) The government shuts down. 6.) The Republicans "change the rules of the Senate" so that budget bills cannot be filibustered after the government is shut down. 7.) The Senate passes the budget. 8.) Obama vetoes the budget. 9.) The Republicans take to...

The House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and odds-on favorite to be next House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said he was not happy with “the process” of the pending budget deal announced Monday night and negotiated by outgoing Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) with the White House.

Last week, when reviewing the next steps in the 2015 version of the debt ceiling "drama" we said that "that the only certain outcome from the melodramatic debt ceiling fight over the next several days, is the following: the US is about to have a brand spanking new debt ceiling, one that should last it until March of 2017: $19,600,000,000,000." Sure enough, with just days left until the November 3rd D-Day when the Treasury runs out of emergency cash and is forced to prioritize debt repayments over government spending, moments ago Politico reported that "congressional leaders and the White House...

You’ve heard this one before and you’re about to hear it again. Congressional Republicans make a deal with President Obama that ostensibly cuts federal spending. That’s what the headlines will proclaim. But in reality, the budget deal - which in this case looks to be in effect for two years - will raise spending in the short term and save all the supposed cuts for the “out years.” Ever wonder when those “out years” are going to arrive? Ha! We’ll have hoverboards first. Real ones. But for now we’ve got something that will allow John Boehner to get out of...

George Osborne was left reeling tonight after peers dramatically threw out the government's planned tax credits cuts - overturning the views of elected MPs. The House of Lords voted 289 to 272 delay the changes for three years until measures could be introduced to protect poor families. The tax credit cuts are central to the Government's plan to eliminate the deficit by 2020 - saving £4.4billion from the welfare bill. Downing Street said the UK was in 'unchartered waters' after the vote, which goes against centuries of tradition that the House of Commons decides financial matters.

Yesterday was slightly heavy on the breaking news front, so this (not unexpected) development went largely overlooked.  President Obama held a photo-op to highlight his decision to veto the bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act, which appropriates $612 billion in defense spending -- a figure that matches Obama's military budget request.  Among other things, the legislation pays the troops and gives them a raise.  It sailed through the Senate with 70 votes, attracting dozens of Democratic votes at both ends of Capitol Hill.  But in an escalation of partisan politics, Obama has refused to sign the measure into law in an effort to coerce Republicans into...

A common refrain heard from policymakers is that there is no extra money in the budget for roads, or for most any other priority. Michigan’s continued economic growth, however, has in fact resulted in extra cash available to meet the Legislature’s spending priorities. Legislators were able to find hundreds of millions of extra road funding in the past three years. While the stated preference is to fund the roads with fuel and vehicle registration taxes — those paid largely by people who use the roads — policymakers have supplemented this revenue with money from the state’s general taxes. This year’s...

[snipets:]If the Congress doesn't increase the debt limit, the Bipartisan Policy Center has estimated that the Treasury will no longer be able to pay all the government's bills from the cash it has on hand sometime between Nov. 10 and 19. Give Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew credit for a modicum of restraint in using the “D” word. That’s “D” as in default.......Look what happened during the 2013 debt-limit showdown. Lew and President Barack Obama tried to use the threat of default to their political advantage: to get the Republicans to stop holding the debt limit hostage to other priorities; and...

The lottery is akin to the magical kingdom where dreams come true. In New York, their constant advertisements on television assure us that all you need is “a dollar and a dream.” Sure, your odds of hitting the big, top level jackpot are significantly worse than getting hit by lightning while being attacked by a shark, but hey… somebody’s got to win, right? And every week somebody does, leading to a huge weight off their minds if they were financially struggling.Unless, of course, they happen to live in Illinois where the state has stopped paying the winners while still...

By now, Illinois' budget problems are no secret. Back in May, after the State Supreme Court struck down a pension reform bid, Moody's move to downgrade the city of Chicago thrust the state's financial woes into the national spotlight. Since then, the situation hasn't gotten any better and despite hiring an "all star" budget guru (for $30,000 a month no less), Bruce Rauner was unable to pass a budget in a timely fashion leading directly to all types of absurdities including everything from the possibility of shortened school years to lottery winners being paid in IOUs. Now, as Bloomberg reports,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional budget analysts said Wednesday that the federal government ran a deficit of $435 billion in the just-completed budget year, the smallest deficit since 2007 and well below the record shortfalls of President Barack Obama's first term.

Remember the much-maligned Tea Party movement? These were the patriotic Americans -- millions of them -- who took to the streets and the town halls across America and revolted against Bush's corporate bailouts, Obama's stimulus spending blowout and Obamacare, and the Fed's policy of tossing trillions of dollars out of helicopter windows (figuratively). Good news: They helped change and maybe even slightly fix America. The latest budget deficit numbers -- for the fiscal year that just ended -- find that the deficit has fallen by $1 trillion since Obama's tragic first term. The deficit is still near half a...

As weeks without a budget turned into months, Republicans decided to push through a stopgap plan to get money to schools, government agencies and programs while talks on a complete budget deal continued. Again it was on party lines, again Wolf vetoed it. "I understand we have divided government," Wolf said. "What I don't understand is people who don't want to govern at all." A few days later the Republican leaders announced they would give the governor a chance to demonstrate he has the votes for tax increases through a floor vote next week, and Democrats have been scrambling to...

Congressional negotiators have come up with a plan to cut costs at the Department of Defense which represents a compromise between proposals from the House and the Senate. Assuming this comes up to a vote and is approved there’s going to be a 25% reduction in the civilian workforce in addition to the introduction of a new retirement plan for the troops. Government Executive Magazine has the details. The 2016 defense authorization compromise bill would require $10 billion in cuts, half of which must occur by fiscal 2018. The one-quarter staff reduction was a compromise between the 20 percent...

Congress had grappled with shutdown drama. On October 1, the government would have run out of money. Last time, the government was shut down, it was a sloppy attempt to gut Obamacare. It was done with the full knowledge that a) Obama would never eviscerate his signature domestic achievement (ever) and b) the Republicans never had the votes to be successful. Even with public opinion siding with the GOP over the various mandates within the health care law, Obama won. The government was reopened–and Obamacare remains the law of the land.With the current squabble over Planned Parenthood, the numbers...

Cutting taxes is great, but as I said, it must be done alongside genuine spending restraint — meaning serious changes to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are consuming an ever-growing share of the budget. Doing one without the other would just kick the can farther down the road, an exercise that politicians are very good at. The good news for the candidates is that a plan to cut spending isn't that hard — on paper, at least. Cato Institute's Dan Mitchell calculated that we could balance the budget by 2021 by capping spending growth at...

Lately, I’ve seen a new Facebook profile template supporting PP. It is an overlay, similar to the rainbow flag one that went viral a few months ago, that says “#StandwithPP”. I want to post a counter to this with a graphic and text. Here is what I’ve come up with:    As I see it, there are two issues driving the current Planned Parenthood debate: Abortion and government spending. I don’t expect anything to change on the abortion front. The Supreme Court says that it’s legal. They’ve been wrong before, but more about that in a second. The second issue...

Americans are funny about taxes: When we complain about them, we don’t moan that we are paying too much — we lament that others are paying too little. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, only 27 percent of Americans cited their own tax liabilities among their complaints about the tax code, while 64 percent complained that other taxpayers — the wicked 1 percenters, the dreaded corporations — were getting off too easy. If you’ve ever met anybody who believes that we can balance the budget by cutting foreign aid, that the Social Security “trust fund” is a real...

Today, by a vote of 47-52, 52 U.S. Senators blocked a vote on a resolution that would have fully funded the government while redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars away from Planned Parenthood and to community health centers. Unfortunately, the 52 Senators who voted ‘no’ prevented the Senate from invoking cloture and overcoming a filibuster. As a result, Planned Parenthood is continuing to receive taxpayer dollars, and a government shutdown continues to loom. Ironically, many of the same 52 Senators who are engaging in a filibuster today are loudly deriding the possibility of a government shutdown in less than a...