Senate Democrats have threatened to block Speaker John Boehner’s $917 billion deficit reduction plan that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling by a similar amount this year. Just what budget cuts are they willing to accept? Republican House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan‘s budget achieved more than $6 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. All House Republicans voted for his budget in | Read More »
President Barack Obama urged legislators this week to “seize the moment,” saying that they had “a chance to stabilize America’s finances for a decade, for fifteen or twenty years.” He is reportedly still pushing Republicans for a “big deal” that would include $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. But why should we believe that he is serious about cutting spending now? | Read More »
Writing for The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne argues that the debate about government spending in America is distracting people from the question how public and private resources can best be brought to bear in an effort to enhance the nation’s competitiveness. Other countries, he believes, are way ahead of the curve. While the United States is not even sure we should have gone halfway toward | Read More »
While a temporary spending measure has averted a government shutdown in the United States, the two major political parties are still tens of billions apart in how much they’re willing to cut. Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to cut $61 billion from this fiscal year’s budget but the Democratic majority in the Senate rejected the measure. Senior Democratic Dick Durbin of Illinois told | Read More »
President Barack Obama has called critics who point out that his budget falls short of restoring fiscal balance “impatient.” After running multitrillion dollar deficits for two years though and bracing for a third, how much more patience does he want? The president introduced a $3.7 trillion budget on Monday that included $100 billion in yearly spending cuts. While his budget would achieve $1.1 trillion in | Read More »
Economist and New York Times contributor Paul Krugman rallies against Republicans’ spending cuts in his latest column, blaming them for sacrificing America’s future in favor of short term political gain. Krugman notes that while the majority of Americans support budget cuts, they actually like to keep the government spending that benefits them. Thus, “Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending,” he believes. The fact | Read More »
House Republicans announced Thursday that they will cut $74 billion from the president’s budget for the current fiscal year. Just $32 billion will be slashed before the end of the calendar year however—far less than the $100 billion Republicans promised ahead of November’s congressional elections. According to Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, who chairs the House budget committee, it’s just a start. “The spending limit measure | Read More »
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week former Republican majority leader Dick Armey and FreedomWorks‘ Matt Kibbe lay out a good number of ways to rein in government spending. They point out that since 2007, federal spending has skyrocketed. If Congress returned to spending levels from before Democrats took control of the legislature, it would save hundreds of billions a year according to combined | Read More »
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