A Look into the Nation’s Fiscal Future and its Possible Outcomes According to the Treasury Department, the budget deficit for the first seven months of this fiscal year was $1.93 trillion – an all-time high. The United State’s national debt is over $28 trillion and counting. Last fiscal year’s deficit was $3.13 trillion, which is the largest it’s […]
The U.S. debt ceiling is always rising. The government has never defaulted on debt because Congress has continued to raise the debt ceiling over the course of the nation’s history. Currently, the deficit is about $28 trillion. What happens if the U.S. is forced into defaulting on the national debt? Here’s what we know. Two […]
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a congressional panel that failing to raise the federal debt ceiling would have catastrophic consequences that could bring on a financial crisis Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a congressional panel Wednesday that failing to raise the federal debt ceiling would have catastrophic consequences that could bring on a financial crisis. Testifying before a Senate Appropriations […]
Bernie Sanders announced yesterday that he wouldn’t support any infrastructure bill that raises the federal gas tax, which currently sits at 18.4 cents per gallon.By golly, we’ve done it. We’ve found a tax Senator Sanders isn’t interested in raising. The gas tax has long created peculiar alliances and alignments in our politics. Plenty of economists we typically […]
We need to raise more tax revenue, but how we do it matters. Like it or not, we need to raise more tax revenue. Both Democrats and Republicans spent the last few decades running up the debt, and it’s getting worse. Despite a vigorous recovery, the Biden administration plans to exceed a 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio for […]
To the editor It is important to me that all Americans pay serious attention to a very important recent development in the world of politics. It appears to me that there have been many well-respected and well-admired economists, some of whom are conservative/Republicans and some of whom are liberal/progressive/Democrats (which I happen to be) who […]
The debt crisis has grown far worse since 1994, when we headed a bipartisan panel. President Clinton asked us in 1994 to chair the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform to study the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and recommend measures to assure their long-term viability. Reforms of these popular programs were […]
Those $1,400 stimulus checks sent by the feds brought people some smiles. The checks accounted for about $410 billion of the entire $1.9 trillion stimulus, according to the Wall Street Journal. After all this federal largesse, our national debt sits at around $28 trillion. A lot of political agendas are pushed with exaggerations to drive […]
Deficit for May at $132 billion, down from year-earlier period Biden budget sees $3.7 trillion gap this year with programs The U.S. budget gap surpassed $2 trillion in the first eight months of fiscal 2021 as government stimulus flowed into the economy to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The shortfall in the year through May was […]
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) confirmed to reporters Thursday that Senate Democrats are discussing a $6 trillion budget reconciliation proposal that would also expand Medicare and lower the cost of prescription drugs. Sanders on Thursday said the proposal builds on President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan. “Yeah, absolutely,” Sanders said when asked […]
