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The federal government collected approximately $2,468,827,000,000 in tax receipts in the first nine months of fiscal 2016 (October through June), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today. Unlike May, when the federal government set a record for inflation-adjusted tax revenues collected in the first eight months of a fiscal year, the federal taxes collected through June did not set a record for inflation-adjusted tax revenues in the first nine months of a fiscal year. While bringing in $2,468,827,000,000 in tax revenues during the first nine months of fiscal 2016, the federal government spent approximately $2,869,674,000,000—running a deficit of $400,847,000,000....

President Barack Obama responded to reports of slow job growth Friday by blaming Republicans who have opposed parts of his economic agenda. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report found the economy added 242,000 new jobs in February. The latest number highlights a long-running trend of slow, yet positive, economic growth. Obama credits the growth to his agenda but its slowness to Republicans for their opposition to his plan. “The plans that we have put in place to grow the economy have worked,” the president declared in the Oval Office. “They would work even faster if we did not have...

When you were a rowdy teen, your parents were the Establishment. Now that you're a parent, what are you? The anti-establishment, cool parent? Not likely. Rather, you're a grownup who tries to keep the peace in your discordant household; who tries to negotiate among self-interested, imperfect family members who have competing goods and goals; and who tries to instill a long-range vision for the future in your desire-ridden family who wants instant self-gratification. Welcome to the Establishment. You're a bona fide member now. Here's a defense of the amorphous, notional Establishment, as I see it, if it even exists in...

House Speaker Paul Ryan called on Republicans Wednesday to stop fighting angrily among themselves and not to be distracted by guns or other "hot-button" issues that President Barack Obama raises this election year. "We can't fall into the progressives' trap of acting like angry reactionaries," Ryan, R-Wis., said at a Heritage Action for America policy meeting. "The left would love nothing more than for a fragmented conservative movement to stand in a circular firing squad, so the progressives can win by default." ...

Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, says he came to Washington to cut spending, not add to the deficits and debt that will crush future generations. He spoke on Thursday, one day after House leaders, working with the White House, produced a $1.1 trillion spending bill. And Brat warned of worse to come. ...

The 2,009 page fiscal 2016 spending deal that the Republican House leadership released today authorizes $1,205,146,000,000 in federal outlays between now and the end of fiscal 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and it does not prohibit funding of Planned Parenthood, according to the House Appropriations Committee. The spending bill is paired with a separate 233-page tax bill. “We are maintaining all of our pro-life protections, including the Hyde Amendment, and we are making cuts to the UNFPA program,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the omnibus spending bill at a press conference today. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s...

American businesses are borrowing at historic high levels, but the only thing growing as a result is how fast their equity capital is vanishing, according to David Stockman, White House budget chief during the Reagan administration. Stockman blamed the Fed and the Fed's Wall Street cheerleaders. He said the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned by nine times since 2000, yet real net investment in the business sector has cratered by 33 percent during the same time period. “Once upon a time businesses borrowed long term money — if they borrowed at all — in order to fund plant, equipment and...

Last week was a bad one for the US dollar, but good for stocks. The greenback had its worst five days of trading in four years, but the Dow rose another 168 points on Friday. This action took place after Madame Janet Yellen, proprietress of the House of the Rising Stockmarket, said she would not be impatient about raising rates. She would not be patient either, she warned. Investors drew the obvious conclusion: She has no idea what she is doing. […] The world of today is not the same world it was 50 years ago. We have a new...

House Democrats have unveiled a $3.7 trillion budget plan for next year. It mirrors President Barack Obama’s call for $1.8 trillion in tax increases on wealthier people and corporations over the coming decade but would add almost $6 trillion to the national debt over that time. […] The plan calls for a wave of new spending for infrastructure like roads and bridges and additional funding for education and medical research. It would make modest curbs on the rapid growth of the popular Medicare program. …

Declaring an end to “mindless austerity,” President Barack Obama called for a surge in government spending Thursday, and asked Congress to throw out the sweeping budget cuts both parties agreed to four years ago when deficits were spiraling out of control. Obama’s proposed $74 billion in added spending—about 7 percent—would be split about evenly between defense programs and the domestic side of the budget. Although he’s sought before to reverse the “sequester” spending cuts, Obama’s pitch in this year’s budget comes with the added oomph of an improving economy and big recent declines in federal deficits. Taking a defiant tone,...

House Republican appropriators say they will follow the two-year budget deal reached after the 2013 government shutdown regardless of who wins control of the Senate in November’s elections. Winning the Senate would give the GOP more leverage in spending fights with the administration, but GOP lawmakers have signaled they don't want to open a new bruising war over spending by rolling back the 2013 budget deal, in which Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) agreed to spending caps for the government for the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years. On the cusp of an election that could deliver...

Write Down This Date: July 1st, 2014 On this date, U.S. House of Representatives Bill "H.R. 2847" goes into effect. It will usher in the true collapse of the U.S. dollar, and will make millions of Americans poorer, overnight. You now have just several months to prepare ... Snopes Opinion: Mixture of Truth & NonTruth Origins: This item about the passage of H.R. 2847 causing the U.S. dollar to collapse as of 1 July 2014 is another example financial scarelore put out in conjunction with an investment come-on, in this case an ominous sales pitch put out by the folks...

One of European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s most important duties is watching his mouth. One ill-considered utterance is enough to sow panic on the financial markets. But during a press conference earlier this month, Draghi allowed himself a telling slip. Speaking to gathered journalists at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Draghi twice almost uttered a word he has been at pains to avoid. “Defla…”, Draghi began, before stopping himself and continuing with the term “low inflation.”Yet despite Draghi’s efforts, the specter of deflation was omnipresent in Washington during the meetings. And it...

President Obama has nominated Janet Yellen to be the next Federal Reserve Chairman. We need to know what she stands for if we want to predict what the central bank will do to us next. Clearly, Yellen will continue Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing, but her papers and speeches show that she is quite different from her predecessor. … … Yellen is all central planner. She gets her ideas, not from Friedman, but from John Maynard Keynes. Keynes did not trust markets, preferring government intervention. His prescribed solution to recession and unemployment is for the government to increase spending and the central...

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on a budget with significant spending cuts, “spending just keeps going up in an uninterrupted fashion as far as the eye can see. By 2016, all you can see is unending red ink.” He added that he has little confidence that the congressional budget committee meeting officially for just the second time on Wednesday will be able to agree on a budget for the rest of the fiscal year that puts the federal government on an economically sustainable course by...

In kicking the proverbial can down the road, Congressional leaders acquiesced to the demand that wealthier Americans pay higher taxes. The higher taxes came in the form of a higher maximum tax rate on those individuals making more than $400,000 and the loss of the favorable tax treatment accorded dividend and capital gains income. Such a strategy pandered to the majority of Americans who don’t believe they are “rich,” but fall into the great “middle class” which the politicians claimed they were protecting. In the meantime, those very politicians have deferred dealing with the real issue that is out of...

In its monthly statement for December, released Friday, the U.S. Treasury says the federal government balanced its budget during the month, bringing in roughly $270 billion in revenues while making roughly $270 billion in expenditures. Yet, the Treasury also says that during December it increased by $63.079 billion the national debt subject to the statutory legal limit set by Congress, thus dramatically bringing the debt to the legal limit on Dec. 31, just as Congress and the White House were involved in final negotiations on a deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff”—which would have canceled all of the lower...

With the fiscal cliff deal and many Obamacare taxes taking effect, Americans will be slammed with an estimated $264 billion in new taxes this year alone—making 2013 memorable for delivering one of the largest one-year tax increases in American history. The math breakdown of the new taxes is simple: Key parts of the Bush tax cuts will expire as a result of the new fiscal cliff legislation, hitting American taxpayers with a tax bill of about $39.5 billion each year for the next decade. … Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi issued a projection that the tax burden will cut GDP...

Government spending is the No. 1 problem in America, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he won’t rule out a government shutdown if President Barack Obama refuses to address the country’s growing fiscal woes. “We now have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece,” McConnell said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s a shame that the president doesn’t embrace the effort to reduce spending.” When host David Gregory asked McConnell about the debt ceiling, and whether Republicans would consider a government shutdown to force the issue of spending cuts, the...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday that she would raise the debt limit unilaterally “in a second” if she were president of the United States. Pelosi and other Democrats have suggested that the president could bypass Congress and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling by invoking the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” … The next battle in Congress will be raising the debt ceiling, after the deal to avert the fiscal cliff failed to address the borrowing limit. President Obama said he “will not...