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.
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CBO Report Parses the Reasons for Part D's Slow Growth
The last few months have seen a number of new ideas to save money in Part D of Medicare by encouraging more efficient use of drugs by prescription...
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McCarthy Suggests Increased Focus on Long-Term Budgeting
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tells Politico that his priorities for the next Congress include the budget process, and in particular...
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Erskine Bowles: Urgency of Federal Deficit Remains
Erskine Bowles is a former co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Commission and member of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He wrote an...
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Social Security is A Little Bit Harder to Secure
Social Security's finances are far from secure, and every year that Congress waits before addressing the problem makes it harder to fix. This week...
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Why the 40-Year Average is a Poor Benchmark
In response to Howard Gleckman's piece on the FY 2014 deficit where he noted that the budget had returned to "normal," Donald Marron wrote that the...
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SSDI Hearings Running Behind
Although the Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Patent Office are infamous among federal agencies for the long wait times and lines, their backlogs pale in...
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CAP Report Warns Against Turning War Spending Into a Slush Fund
The Center for American Progress' Katherine Blakeley and Lawrence Korb recently issued a report recommending how lawmakers should wind down war...
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Coburn Publishes Wastebook 2014
Year after year, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) refuses to simply give lip service to "wasteful government spending" and has instead called out...
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Medicare's Slowdown: A Story About Part D
In a Health Affairs blog post, CRFB's Loren Adler and Adam Rosenberg find that most of the recent slowdown in Medicare's costs is attributable to the...
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Maya MacGuineas: Yes, the Deficit Is Smaller. But That Wasn’t the Main Problem.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, wrote a commentary that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Washington...
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How CBO Accounts for Anti-Fraud Efforts
Fraud -- along with the closely related waste and abuse -- is too often cited as a big factor affecting our high deficits, even though this is not the...
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My View: Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles
Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are the former chairs of the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Commission and members of the Committee for a Responsible Federal...