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.
Top Ten Tax Expenditures: JCT releases its annual report
Earlier this week the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the congressional group that provides cost estimates and tax expertise to Congress, issued...
Fed Earns Money, TARP Loses It
The Federal Reserve announced, this morning, that it will transfer $46.1 billion in FY2009 profits over to the Treasury, higher than the $31.7 billion...
Moving the Tax Expiration Goal Posts
The President may choose to submit a budget in which he extends the Bush tax cuts only temporarily—say for two years, rather than permanently as was...
Deficit Hawks Love their Cake
Over the weekend one of our favorite bloggers, EconomistMom, joined an important discussion prompted by a Stan Collender blog that called out deficit...
David Walker and the Federal Deficit on NPR
This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition one of our board members, David Walker, discussed his new book, Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and...
One More FDIC Bank Closing
On January 8, the FDIC reported that it has taken over an additional bank ( Horizon Bank) for a cost to the FDIC of about $540 billion. This brings...
CBO Monthly Budget Review Shows Record December Deficit
The government ran record deficits of $390 billion in the first quarter of FY2010, according to the CBO’s Monthly Budget Review. Even last year, with...
How Much Will Health Reform Cost?
UPDATE: CMS released its estimates of the final Senate bill on Friday. The short answer is that it depends who you ask. Today, the RAND Corporation...
Laura Tyson Argues for Deficit Reduction
Laura Tyson, a former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, warned in a Bloomberg op-ed this morning that cutting back on fiscal...
Rivlin Says U.S. Debt Scolds Cannot Be Ignored Much Longer
CRFB board member and former CBO and OMB director, Alice Rivlin, argued in Bloomberg, today, that policymakers should put a deficit-reduction plan in...
Obama Said to Support Tax on Health Insurance
According to the Associated Press, President Obama has encouraged House leaders to support the Senate's excise tax on high-cost insurance plans. As we...
Tough Challenge Facing Obama Administration in Last Days of Budget Deliberations
Today’s New York Times article on the difficulty President Obama faces in keeping his promise about deficit reduction and tax cuts, Promise to Trim...