Budget

Kansas or California as a Model for America’s Future Growth?

By The Fiscal Times Staff

If you had to choose either Kansas or California to serve as a model for America’s future growth, which would it be, Bloomberg’s Barry Ritholtz asks . The answer, he argues, is obvious — yet...
Kamala Harris' Trillion-Dollar Tax Plan

By Michael Rainey

Republicans aren’t the only ones coming up with trillion-dollar tax plans. California’s Kamala Harris, a rising Democratic star in the Senate, released a proposal Thursday to repeal the $1.9 trillion...
McConnell: Entitlement Cuts Probably Won’t Happen Under Trump

By Yuval Rosenberg

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) unleashed a storm of Democratic criticism earlier this week by telling Bloomberg News that rising deficits and debt are driven by Social Security,...
Trump Wants Federal Agencies to Cut Spending by 5%

By Michael Rainey and Yuval Rosenberg

President Trump instructed his cabinet secretaries Wednesday to reduce their departmental spending by 5 percent or more next year. “Some of you will say, ‘Hey, I can do much more than five,’” Trump...
Hurricane Michael Might Have Damaged More Than $1 Billion Worth of F-22s

By Michael Rainey

By the time Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle last week, most of the aircraft based at Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City had been flow out of harm’s way. But between four and 17 F-22...

Federal Deficit Jumps 17 Percent to $779 Billion

By Yuval Rosenberg

Despite a strong economy and robust job market, the federal budget deficit swelled to $779 billion in fiscal 2018, up $113 billion from 2017, according to final numbers released Monday by the...
Mnuchin Spins a False Claim About Tax Cuts and the Deficit

By Yuval Rosenberg

The Congressional Budget Office projected last week that the federal government’s fiscal 2018 deficit would total $782 billion. The final numbers will be released by the Treasury Department, but...
Pentagon Grounds All F-35s

By Michael Rainey

The U.S. Defense Department grounded all F-35 jets on Thursday, on the heels of a crash on September 28 in South Carolina. Investigators examining the loss of an F-35B, the Marine Corps’ version of...
Trump’s Border Wall: A Christmastime Clash Is Coming

By Yuval Rosenberg

There won’t be much holiday cheer on Capitol Hill this year, Politico’s Playbook warns : “Over the last few days, we’ve seen a massive ramp-up of the ‘build-the-wall’ rhetoric from key Hill...
How GOP Rhetoric on Entitlements Has Changed

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The Washington Post’s David Weigel describes how Republicans have changed their tune on Medicare and, for this year at least, largely abandoned the idea of entitlement reform: “[O]ver eight years,...

Column of the Day: ‘Why Are Republican Policy Ideas Falling So Flat?’

By The Fiscal Times Staff

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that “Republicans have decisively lost the battle of ideas” given that “their major policy moves, on health care, taxes and tariffs, are playing badly...
A $24,000 Generic Drug Bargain?

By The Fiscal Times Staff

Gilead Sciences said it will start offering generic versions of its hepatitis C drugs Harvoni and Epclusa next year at a cost $24,000 for a full course of treatment. Gilead introduced Harvoni in 2014...
Elizabeth Warren’s $500 Billion Housing Plan

By Michael Rainey

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced an ambitious bill Tuesday that targets the growing problem facing millions of Americans: soaring rents and unaffordable home prices. The American Housing and...
The Deficit Is Heading to $1 Trillion. How Worried Should We Be?

By Michael Rainey

Should we be worried about the rising federal deficit? If not, when should we start worrying – when it hits $1 trillion a year? $2 trillion? Never? That’s the topic of debate in a Bloomberg piece...
Why Trump May Opt for a Shutdown

By Michael Rainey

President Trump’s abrupt criticism of a key spending bill yesterday has some political prognosticators saying there’s a real possibility of a government shutdown in the next 10 days. The Senate bill...