Federal Budget and Economy Archive

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Partisan congressional squabbling over the nation’s debt limit once again threatens to shut down the federal government and perhaps trigger a worldwide financial crisis. The debt limit as currently structured is toddler fiscal policy. Every parent of a young child knows what I am talking about: Little Peter gets all dressed up in

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares The most important thing to know about the tax bill proposed by House Ways & Means Committee Richard Neal (D-MA) is that it’s big. Really big. The congressional Joint Committee on taxation estimates the massive plan would raise taxes on corporations and high-income households by roughly $2.1 trillion over 10 years, use about

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares In 1948, Congress and President Truman adopted the Marshall Plan that at its peak provided about 2 percent of total US gross domestic product to aid Europe’s recovery from World War II—close to ten times the level of international assistance provided today. After leading the world in the production of vaccines, why hasn’t

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Buried in today’s partisan squabbles over President Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda is a fundamental question:  How can government best increase the nation’s wealth? Does it do so by taxing the wealthy and spending more on income supports for much of the public, as many Democrats want? Or by limiting taxes on capital income

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares President Biden and a bipartisan group of senators have agreed to the framework of a plan to boost infrastructure spending by about $579 billion. On top of already planned spending for roads, bridges, transit, water, and broadband, it would amount to a massive $1 trillion.  And they have agreed to pay for it

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares Those of us who have been writing about the federal budgets for too long remember the sad history of presidents trotting out wildly optimistic economic assumptions to explain away growing deficits and debt. It was a tried-and-true way to hide their unwillingness to pay for ambitious spending with too little tax revenue. Former

TweetShareSharePin0 Shares On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department released much-anticipated guidance for the American Recovery Plan’s (ARP) $350 billion in direct state and local aid, including details on how it will implement the law’s restriction on using ARP funds for state tax cuts. Treasury’s rules give states plenty of flexibility. But there are limits, and