Blog
Welcome to our blog – The Bottom Line, where you’ll find up-to-date commentary and analysis on the most important news in the fiscal world. Below is a list of our blog posts.
CRFB's Updated Realistic Baseline
With the Budget Control Act now in the books, it's time for us to update our CRFB Realistic Baseline from our projections a month ago. In addition to...
CBO on the Caps
The caps on discretionary spending were, of course, the concrete centerpiece of last week's budget deal. Considering the importance of the caps, CBO...
‘Line’ Items: Downturns and Downgrades Edition
Downers – Markets were down last week on fears that the European debt crisis was spreading and that the U.S. recovery was slowing down. These losses...
MY VIEW: Maya MacGuineas August 8 2011
In two recent commentaries, written for CNN and CNN Money, CRFB president Maya MacGuineas talks about S&P's recent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating...
S & P Downgrades the United States
Yesterday, the Standard & Poor's rating agency downgraded the United States' long-term bond rating from AAA to AA+. This downgrade is consistent with...
Will We Have a Lower Deficit This Year Than Last Year?
Budget projections are a rather fickle thing, especially in the midst of great uncertainty about the strength of the economic recovery. By accident...
CBO Releases Social Security Projections
CBO's latest Social Security projections bring no surprises to anyone familiar with the state of the program's finances. CBO projects the program to...
OMB Director Jack Lew on the Defense Cuts in the Debt Deal
The main savings feature that the debt deal (the Budget Control Act) contained--outside of the joint committee--is the discretionary spending caps...
CRFB Board Members Offer Thoughts on Debt Deal
The debt deal signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday has provoked all kinds of reactions from the media, the public, and lawmakers ( click here...
New York Times' David Leonhardt on The Colbert Report
Last night on The Colbert Report, David Leonhardt of The New York Times talked about the debt deal recently signed into law and why it's not enough to...
Options for Limiting Tax Expenditures
Update: Howard Gleckman of Tax Policy Center has blogged on their paper over at TaxVox. With the chaos of the debt ceiling now over, it's time to take...
MY VIEW: Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson August 2011
In an op-ed in today's New York Times, CRFB board members and former fiscal commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Sen. Alan Simpson offered their...