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.
Life Expectancy, Health, and the Budget
As we've written many times before, the U.S. population is aging and in doing so putting increasing pressure on Social Security, Medicare, and to some...
Tax Reform is Really Hard But Worth The Effort
Update: The Tax Policy Center has released a distributional analysis of the reducing the top individual and corporate rates to 25 percent and...
Appropriations Update: Progress Beginning to Slow
Update: Post-sequester figures have been revised according to the most recent estimates. Another month has gone by, and while on paper the budget...
New Life for a Grand (or Petite) Bargain?
With both the Senate's and House's Transportation-Housing and Urban Development (THUD) appropriations bill stalled, it seems unlikely Congress will be...
Kotlikoff Argues for Generational and Fiscal Gap Accounting
Detroit's recent bankruptcy makes it the largest municipal bankruptcy in our nation's history as the city seeks to restructure $18 billion in debt...
Get Ready for Budget Numbers to Change
As of Wednesday's GDP report, GDP for fiscal year 2012 was revised upward by roughly $560 billion to a total of $16.2 trillion. This almost Houdini...
Transparency and Containing Health Care Costs
As we have written before, the recent downward turn in the growth of health care costs is an encouraging development, but one that may not last in the...
Opening the Tax Reform Vault
Updated 8/2/2013: Newly released submissions to the Finance Committee have been added. The deadline for Senators to make their arguments for what tax...
The 2013 SAVE Award Contest Begins
In 2009, President Obama created the SAVE Award (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency), encouraging federal employees to submit their ideas to...
On the President's Proposed "Grand Bargain"
The talk of the town in recent days has been President Obama's new plan to combine corporate tax reform with public investments in what President...
Appropriations Bill Lands With a THUD on the Floor
Yesterday, the House Transportation-Housing and Urban Development (THUD) appropriations bill was removed from floor consideration, showing a lack of...
Raising Retirement Age Would Promote Working Longer
The 2008 recession substantially altered the enrollment and operations of many government programs, particularly those providing financial benefits...