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At 7:36 pm Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow tweeted “BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC. (Seriously),” sending the internet into a frenzy of theorizing. Did Maddow have Donald Trump’s tax returns or just one of the Trumps’ tax returns? Could this be it, the tax return that would bring down the Donald? If this was it, why wasn't MSNBC cutting into its programming, instead of running a countdown clock to Maddow’s show? By 8:24, Maddow was tweeting that the tax return in question was Donald Trump’s 1040 from 2005. By 8:30, still half an hour before Maddow...

According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, a full repeal of Obamacare would insure more Americans than Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare-lite reforms. The CBO’s analysis on the Republican leadership’s plan to repeal Obamacare predicts it would drop insurance for 14 million people in 2018, while 24 million would lose insurance by 2026. Compared to these figures, the CBO’s research on the 2015 full repeal bill indicated it would insure more Americans than the Ryan plan. Phillip Klein, managing editor of the Washington Examiner, stated that despite the Ryan plan doling out billions of dollars in tax credits, the plan also...

If you haven’t seen OMB Director Mick Mulvaney in action, do yourself a favor and watch the video here. On today’s Morning Joe, Mulvaney showed himself to be smart, well-spoken, undefensive and down-to-earth as he systematically demolished Mika’s, and by extension, the CBO’s, claims about the Trump admin’s health care proposal. Before Mulvaney appeared, the panel had engaged in extended hand-wringing over the loss of coverage that the CBO has projected. Mulvaney made three telling points: View the video here.

Health Reform: Democrats are no doubt gleeful that the Congressional Budget Office says the Republican health plan would leave 24 million more people uninsured by 2026. But there's no reason to rely on the CBO, since they were wildly off the mark in predicting how well ObamaCare would work. Shortly before President Obama signed ObamaCare into law, the CBO announced its findings that the health reform would cut the deficit in the first decade by a modest $119 billion, and possibly slash them by a trillion dollars in the second decade. The CBO also predicted that 23 million people would...

The Trump administration on Monday lashed out at the Congressional Budget Office’s report that estimated that about 24 million more Americans in a few years would be uninsured under the new legislation. The bill, called the American Health Care Act, would be “less generous” with new tax credits for those receiving subsidies under the current law and the plan would likely increase average premiums in the nongroup market until 2020. Tom Price, the Health and Human Services secretary, downplayed the report and said, “we disagree strenuously with the report that was put out. It’s just not believable is what we...

Republicans in the House and Senate wanted to see a score from the Congressional Budget Office on the American Health Care Act before casting a vote either way. The CBO obliged today, giving AHCA backers good news for budget hawks, but potentially bad news on the political front. Despite assurances that the effort would not leave Americans behind, CBO estimates that fourteen million Americans would be added to the rolls of the uninsured, while the AHCA saves the federal government $337 billion in deficit spending over the next decade: CBO and JCT estimate that enacting the legislation would reduce...

Just as we predicted, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a report demonstrating that the “too-clever-by-half” approach of RINOcare will result in the worst possible outcome for insurance prices and coverage numbers. It’s clear that by exacerbating the death spiral of the existing failed market before 2020, the political reality will ensure that even the minor reforms implemented to Medicaid and the exchange subsidies in 2020 will never occur. And the disaster will all be blamed on a wrongly-perceived Obamacare repeal bill instead of Obamacare itself. Full repeal is the only solvent way forward.

The United States has the highest top statutory corporate tax rate—39.1%—of any nation in the G20, according to a study released Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office. That rate is nearly twice as high as the 20-percent rate in Russia, which, along with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has the lowest statutory corporate tax rate in the G20. The U.S. won the top spot on the statutory-corporate-tax-rate list after Japan and Germany, which formerly ranked first and second, cut their rates. “The United States made no change in federal corporate tax rates between 2003 and 2012,” said the CBO, “and by...

Congressional analysts Tuesday projected that President Donald Trump has inherited a stable economy and a government that is on track to run a $559 billion budget deficit for the ongoing budget year. The new estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office say the economy will hold relatively steady, with economic growth rising slightly to 2.3 percent this year and unemployment averaging less than 5 percent for the duration of Trump’s term. Trump is promising higher growth as his administration curbs regulations, overhauls the tax code, and repeals the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment. …

The Congressional Budget Office has stepped into the Obamacare repeal fight, issuing a fierce warning to Republicans in the form of … a sternly worded blog post. CBO is the government’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, the agency that tells Congress how much new programs cost and who they’ll cover. This is important, because in principle you could provide insurance coverage to everyone while spending practically nothing if you were willing to make the insurance totally worthless.

The Congressional Budget Office this week backed away from the idea of taxing cars based on how far they drive in order to boost federal highway taxes, after initially saying the idea is one that could be explored. . . . The Obama administration and others have floated the idea of imposing a tax on vehicle miles traveled tax, or a VMT tax, which would charge people based on how far they drive. And in 2011, CBO put out a report that said this was a "practical" option in light of new technology that makes it easier to track cars...

The American debt problem was almost entirely ignored at the Republican National Convention last week, and we can expect nothing more when the Democrats gather this week. Both parties support the entitlement spending system and the decrepit tax system that fails to support it. They compete on the fiscal side of politics with impossible promises to spend more and tax less. Imagine the U.S. Treasury as an airplane beginning to roll down the runway to take off. For a mile or so, the plane gains no altitude, then the wings start to generate lift. The wheels leave the ground and...

Health Reform: ObamaCare has been taking lots of hits lately, but a new report from the Congressional Budget Office is a gut punch. It shows that ObamaCare’s outlook has worsened considerably as fewer people sign up and costs rise more than expected.

In the latest report to undercut President Obama’s “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” promise, the Congressional Budget Office projects millions of workers will leave employer-sponsored health plans over the next decade because of ObamaCare. Some will opt to go on Medicaid, but others will be kicked off their company plans by employers who decide not to offer coverage anymore, according to a new CBO report titled, “Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance Coverage for People Under Age 65: 2016 to 2026.” “As a result of the ACA, between 4 million and 9 million fewer people...

Three years ago, on the eve of Obamacare’s implementation, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that President Obama's centerpiece legislation would result in an average of 201 million people having private health insurance in any given month of 2016. Now that 2016 is here, the CBO says that just 177 million people, on average, will have private health insurance in any given month of this year—a shortfall of 24 million people. Indeed, based on the CBO's own numbers, it seems possible that Obamacare has actually reduced the number of people with private health insurance. In 2013, the CBO projected that,...

The slow-motion implosion of Obamacare continues with the newest report from the Congressional Budget Office foreseeing up to 9 million Americans losing their employer-based insurance coverage over the next decade because of spiking premiums. The Washington Times: Obamacare insurance premiums will leap 6 percent a year over the next decade, and companies will drop millions of employees from their health plans as insurers and employers calibrate their offerings for the new marketplace, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday. The health law will continue to steadily grow in both cost and coverage, working toward President Obama’s goal of expanding those with...

The congressional budget office has revised its Obamacare enrollment target for 2016 downward by a million people. This is the second such downgrade the CBO has issued in 2016. The Hill reports: About 12 million people are now expected to have ObamaCare coverage by the end of 2016, according to the nonpartisan budget office. Just three months ago, the office had predicted that 13 million people would have coverage.The latest enrollment estimate is an even steeper drop from the CBO’s estimates from 2015, which predicted 21 million people would have marketplace coverage by this time. The enrollment after the end...

The headline you'll read is that the Rubio plan cuts taxes by $6.8 trillion over a decade. This needs to be put in the context of the $42 trillion of revenue the federal government is projected to collect over the next ten years. So it's a big score, but it's not so big when compared to the larger tax revenue picture. Rarely are these two numbers associated, as they always should be. Needless to say, they are not in the TPC report. TPC themselves admit that they lack the capacity to do a macroeconomic analysis of the plan. In other...

In the midst of the election circus and pageantry, it seems once again fiscal policy issues have taken a backseat. This might not matter if the issue were not of dire importance to Americans and their futures. But on the heels of the new Budget and Economic Outlook released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week, it has become all too clear that the fiscal issues our country faces are very real and must be dealt with. Every year, this non partisan analysis of our projected debt and deficit published doesn't mince words- the deficit only continues to get...

Taxpayers will have to shell out an estimated $18 billion more to subsidize Obamacare in 2016 despite lower than expected enrollment in the health care exchanges, according to a forecast by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In its latest 10-year economic forecast, CBO predicted that 13 million Americans would purchase health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges in 2016, with 11 million of them receiving government subsidies to help pay for their premiums. But that figure is 40 percent lower than the 21 million enrollees CBO predicted last year would sign up. ...