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.
Bernanke on Fiscal Exit Strategy
On December 3rd, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before the Senate Banking Committee for the hearing on his nomination to a...
Fiscally Responsible Organizations Issue Statement on Health Care Reform
A group of budget experts including CRFB president, Maya MacGuineas, released a “Statement on Health Care Reform,” calling for further efforts to...
House Votes to Make Estate Tax Permanent
The House today voted to avoid eliminating the estate tax next year, only to have it return in 2011 at higher levels. Instead, the current levels of...
TARP Winding Down as BofA Says It Will Repay Aid
Secretary Geithner recently said that the Administration will outline its exit strategy for TARP in the next few weeks, but the expiration date has...
Bad Budget Concepts and The Case of Student Loans
Sometimes, the way we score certain items in the budget leads to sub-optimal policy choices. For example, as we explained recently, the long-term care...
Let's Offset the Costs of the Troop Surge
Last night President Obama gave a long-awaited speech on his plan for increasing troop levels, stating his intention to increase troops by 30,000...
Stimulus COBRA Subsidies Begin Expiring
Today, federal COBRA subsidies that help unemployed workers purchase health insurance from their former employers begin expiring. February’s stimulus...
CBO Reports on the Effect of Reform on Premiums
Under the Senate health care reform bill the average American will pay about the same for insurance as he or she pays now, the CBO and the Joint...
CBO Report Discusses ARRA Effect on Jobs, GDP Growth
The Congressional Budget Office has come out with a report estimating the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on employment and...
Considering a War Tax
Update: An editorial in today's Washington Post discusses the possibility o f increasing the gasoline tax to help pay for the troop increase. The...
Weekend Editorial Roundup
Here are the highlights from this weekend’s editorials on fiscal and budget policy: The Wall Street Journal calls the pharmaceutical industry foolish...
How to Reduce National Health Spending
The New England Journal of Medicine, last week, had an article by four RAND researchers on Controlling U.S. Health Care Spending. Using Massachusetts...