Blog
Welcome to our blog – The Bottom Line, where you’ll find up-to-date commentary and analysis on the most important news in the fiscal world. Below is a list of our blog posts.
An Irresponsible "Tax Extender" Package
Senate Democratic leadership is reportedly considering a last minute effort to extend 55 expiring tax provisions for another year, including a large...
The Sequester’s Impact on Health Reform
The Murray-Ryan budget deal would mitigate some of the 2014 and 2015 sequester, but it actually still leaves the sequester’s cuts to mandatory...
The FOMC Tapers, But That's Not All!
In a move that has been discussed and anticipated for months, the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee announced that it would slightly...
CBO 95 Percent Confident Social Security Trust Fund Runs Out in 25 Years
CBO's Long-Term Budget Outlook contains significant amounts of helpful data on Social Security. However, a lot of the data focus on just the outlays...
The Final Four Is Here...For the SAVE Award
While the Final Four for the NCAA tournament is still almost four months away, another Final Four is taking place right now. Although it won't be held...
Coburn Publishes Wastebook 2013
For years, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) resisted the temptation to talk in broad generalities about "wasteful government spending" and has instead been...
William Hoagland: The Real Value of the Budget Deal
It has been one week since Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced they had reached a bipartisan budget agreement, which is now...
Understanding the Defense Retirement Reforms in the Bipartisan Budget Act
As CRFB has explained in a recent analysis, the Bipartisan Budget Act under consideration in the Senate would replace a portion of the mindless...
The Tax Break-Down: Charitable Deduction
This is the fifteenth post in our blog series, The Tax Break-Down, which will analyze and review tax breaks under discussion as part of tax reform...
MY VIEW: Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson December 2013
The budget agreement reached by the Senate and the House last week both has some good elements and bad elements. In particular, it replaces some of...
How the Bipartisan Budget Act Improves the Long Term
As we've said before, paying for temporary costs with savings that grow over the long term is very helpful for the long-term budget outlook, as it...
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Bipartisan Budget Act
On Wednesday, we published an analysis of the Bipartisan Budget Act, which would replace a portion of the FY2014 and FY2015 sequester with mandatory...