President Joe Biden is taking victory laps for last year’s reduced budget deficit. No one would be happier than me to see this number fall in a significant way. But the decline has nothing to do with the president’s policies, and it changes little about the dangers of our fiscal situation. According to monthly reporting […]
Lawmakers stuffed more than 4,000 pet projects, totaling more than $8 billion, into an omnibus federal spending bill passed in March. But wait, didn’t Congress ban earmarks back in 2011? Yes, a Republican majority in 2011 banned earmarks, also called pork-barrel spending, in response to scandals like Alaska’s $398 million “Bridge to Nowhere” and the […]
By the time inflation comes under control sometime next year, the federal budget deficit will be ballooning once again—and on course to hit $2 trillion annually by the end of the decade. The new economic and budgetary outlook released by the Congressional Budget Office this week forecasts steady if unspectacular economic growth for the next […]