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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
Erskine Bowles to Kiplinger: Beware the Ticking Debt Bomb
Today, Kiplinger's Personal Finance published a new interview with Fiscal Commission co-chair and CRFB board member Erskine Bowles. In a discussion...
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Spending Agreement "Splits the Difference" for 2014
On Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan announced a budget deal that set discretionary spending levels for the next two years, removed some...
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WaPo: A Flawed Deal is Better Than No Deal
So far, reactions to the budget agreement have been mixed. As we said in our report yesterday, Understanding the Bipartisan Budget Act, the deal...
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Diving Deeper Into the Budget Conference Agreement
With the details on the agreement reached by Budget Committee chairs Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Patty Murray (D-WA) made fully available yesterday, CRFB has...