A chart created by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has been circulating among liberal bloggers such as Ezra Klein, James Fallows, and Andrew Sullivan. The chart, seen to the right, purports to show that the next decade’s deficits are entirely the result of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, wars, bailouts, recession, and stimulus. Their methodology fails statistics 101. Imagine a basketball team that loses 100-98. It would make no sense to cherry pick one single basket by their opponent and blame it for 100 percent of the …
The Republican Study Committee (RSC) has released a 10-year budget blueprint that reins in federal spending, balances the budget, and modernizes the federal budget process. While President Obama’s budget would bury the nation in $9.5 trillion of additional debt over the next decade, the RSC would accumulate just $1.8 trillion of debt over the next eight years before balancing the budget in 2020. And they accomplish this without raising taxes. Much of the RSC budget builds on the bold plan offered by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Both …
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has completed its initial review of President Barack Obama’s budget request and found that the White House significantly understated the cost of and red ink in its budget. While President Obama claimed his budget would produce $7.2 trillion in deficits (a staggering figure) over the next decade, CBO calculated $9.5 trillion in deficits. That is more debt than the federal government accumulated from 1789–2010 combined. Overall, CBO estimates that the national debt held by the public—40 percent of GDP before the recession—would soar past 87 …
The federal government made at least $125 billion in improper payments last year. It spends $25 billion annually maintaining unused or vacant federal properties. Rife with duplication, Washington runs 342 economic development programs, 130 programs serving the disabled, 130 programs serving at-risk youth, and 90 early childhood development programs. Government waste runs rampant, yet Congress never seems focused on cleaning it up. A new bipartisan proposal sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R–UT) and Mark Udall (D–CO) and Representative Jeff Duncan (R–SC) would force Congress to address this problem. The bill …
House and Senate leaders are caught in a debate over real and phantom discretionary spending cuts. Senate leaders have proposed freezing 2011 discretionary spending at 2010 levels. Because this rejects the President’s proposed $39 billion increase, they are calling their yet-to-be-released proposal a $39 billion cut—essentially, claiming credits for “cuts” against a spending level that was never enacted in the first place. By contrast, the House-passed bill not only rejected the President’s proposed $39 billion hike but actually $61 billion cut off the 2010 level. Thus, only the House bill …
House Republicans are now pledging to reduce fiscal year 2011 discretionary spending to $100 billion below President Obama’s original request. As reported, this new budget proposal would: Unwisely reduces security spending by $16 billion relative to President Obama’s request; and Reduce non-security spending by $84 billion relative to President Obama’s request and by $69 billion compared to the 2010 level. Rather than stop at $84 billion, lawmakers could seek a full $100 billion reduction in non-security discretionary spending. Defense should be funded at the level proposed in the FY2011 president’s …
Following the Democratic Senate’s recent failure to push through a massive, 1,924-page omnibus spending bill stuffed with runaway spending and pork, cooler heads seem to be prevailing. The Senate now appears poised to pass a basic continuing resolution that would freeze fiscal year (FY) 2011 discretionary spending at FY 2010 levels until March 4, when the next Congress will have the opportunity to pare back spending. Last week, a Heritage Foundation analysis stated that an acceptable continuing resolution should (a) spend no more than last year’s level, (b) not shift …
As recession-weary Americans continue to tighten their belts, not even trillion-dollar deficits can persuade Senate Democrats to stop their spending spree. In a single 1,924-page bill—which was crafted in secret and will be voted on before anyone has read it fully—Congress is set to spend a staggering $1.1 trillion on discretionary programs for fiscal year (FY) 2011, plus an additional $160 billion in emergency war spending. To put this in context, non-emergency discretionary spending has already surged by $217 billion (25 percent) in the past three years—plus an additional $311 …
Preliminary figures from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show that Washington ran a $1.291 trillion deficit in 2010, just slightly less than last year’s $1.416 trillion. To put these figures in perspective, the annual budget deficit between 1789 and 2008 never reached $500 billion. As a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), the past two years’ deficits of 10.0 and 8.9 dwarf all other deficits since World War II. Recession-damped revenues continued to contribute to the budget deficit, coming in at 14.7 percent of GDP. However, low revenues are …
In his Monday “Hey Small Spender” column, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman bizarrely denied that federal spending has significantly expanded over the past two years. He asserted that “[t]here never was a big expansion of government spending” and “the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened.” Yet for his talk about a “fact-free” disinformation campaign, Krugman curiously provides no data on total federal spending. This may be because all official budget data reveals a different story. According to President Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget—the keepers of …
