Coloring President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2012 are the undeniable shades of masked fiscal disaster and a want of long-term solutions. According to analysis (pdf) by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the President’s budget would result in $1.43 trillion and $1.16 trillion deficits for FYs 2011 and 2012, respectively, adding two more years of annual deficits in excess of $1 trillion. Total spending would increase by 57 percent over the next decade, from $3.7 trillion this year to $5.8 trillion in 2021. Net interest alone mushrooms …
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) just released its 2011 Trade Policy Agenda, which highlights several initiatives designed to boost exports. Nowhere in the 443-page document is a mention of the biggest barrier to U.S. exports: the federal budget deficit. Budget deficits require the government to borrow money that otherwise could be spent on U.S.-made exports or invested in our economy’s productive private sector. In 2010, the federal government financed its deficit spending by selling $708 billion in Treasury securities to foreign buyers. To put that in perspective, …
The federal government ran a budget deficit last month of $223 billion, according to recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). With deficits consistently running to levels almost beyond human comprehension, it would be easy to miss the fact that this was the largest single-month deficit on record. So, what are Congress and President Obama doing about it? The House of Representatives took the first step to get deficit spending under control by passing a Continuing Resolution to fund the government for the rest of the year for $61 …
Uncle Sam is spending you into the poorhouse. Taxes, inflation, unemployment, interest rates – all could skyrocket if Washington keeps spending trillions of dollars it doesn’t have. Unless we begin to cut spending now (a lot of spending) these four horsemen of debt will ride roughshod over families and businesses already struggling to get by. Fortunately, we still have a chance to kick the spending addiction and keep the American Dream alive. What Can’t Go on Forever, Won’t Between 2007 and today, total federal spending rose by almost 36%. Meanwhile, …
According to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathy Sebelius, the design of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program has basic flaws, but the bureaucracy will fix those flaws with hard work and deep thinking. Sebelius spoke on the CLASS program on Monday at a Kaiser Family Foundation briefing, and she outlined the Obama Administration’s updated technocratic thinking on this new government-run, long-term care entitlement created under Obamacare. Sebelius was in part responding to the recent assault on CLASS from a wide breadth of experts. According to …
As the Treasury Department reminded us on Wednesday, the federal government will likely reach the debt limit sometime between April 5 and May 31. Hitting the debt ceiling provides a rare moment when Congress and the President are forced to take a stand on a most fundamental and difficult issue: whether the federal government will continue to deficit spend. A central question in the debt limit debate is whether the government would risk defaulting on its outstanding debt. Contrary to disappointing Administration inferences, the answer is that there is no …
For the last couple of decades, Social Security analysts, public trustees, and even both Republican and Democratic Presidents have warned that unless the program is fixed, it faces perpetual cash-flow deficits. And now, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that those perpetual deficits have arrived. As a result, it is even more urgent that Social Security is fixed and placed on a firm fiscal footing. While the program will be able to pay the benefits that it has promised older Americans, younger workers can expect a 22 percent across-the-board benefit …
In his Tuesday State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said Americans must “understand [that] if we don’t take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery—all of which would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes.” This is all true. But then in a total failure of leadership, President Obama went on to completely abandon his own deficit commission’s spending cut proposals. Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that …
When I was first elected Governor of Minnesota, the state budget had grown an average of 20.5% every two years for four decades. This spending path was unsustainable. That’s why as governor, I held the line on taxes and spending. We’ve cut average annual budget increased to about 2% and this biennium we actually cut real government spending for the first time in Minnesota’s 150-year history. Thanks to these tough choices, Minnesota now stands ready to lead the nation out of the recession. A recent editorial in the Wall Street …
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 …
