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.
Fed Begins Making Reverse Repurchase Agreements
This week, the New York Federal Reserve announced the beginning of a new Reverse Repurchase Agreement Program to reduce some of the liquidity in...
Mankiw's Problem with Deficit Neutrality
From Greg Mankiw: Imagine you have a friend who has a budget problem. Every month he spends more than he earns. His credit card bills are piling up...
The Deficit Challenge Turns to Government Assets...
In a blog post yesterday, Donald Marron discussed an additional way for governments to ease budget pressures along with traditional spending cuts and...
The 90 percent Debt-to-GDP Threshold and CBO’s New Debt Estimates
On March 5, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave us a preview of its take on the President’s budget proposals for Fiscal Year 2011 (starting...
More Analysis of the President's Budget
On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office released its Preliminary Analysis of the President’s Budget. (Last week we offered a few graphs and a short...
Deadlines Are Made To Be Broken
Here's a good one for you: Using the House legislative calendar as a guide, as of March 10, Congress will have 16 legislative days to enact a budget...
Senate Should Post Information on Spending
UPDATE: The Coburn amendment was agreed to on a 100-0 vote. The Senate today will consider a proposal from Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) to post...
‘Line’ Items: Oscars Edition
Temporary Tax Extensions Avoid “The Hurt Locker” – The Senate passed H.R. 4691, a 30-day extension of several expired tax breaks and unemployment and...
Are Social Security Surpluses Gone for Good?
Along with their analysis of the President's Budget, on Friday, CBO updated its Social Security projections. And as it turns out, the surpluses are...
Four More FDIC Bank Closings
On Friday evening, the FDIC reported that it has taken over an additional four banks ( Centennial Bank, Waterfield Bank, Bank of Illinois, Sun...
Weekend Editorial Roundup
Here are the highlights from this weekend’s editorials on fiscal and budget policy: The New York Times called on Congress to do more to create jobs...
Past Uses of Reconciliation
In last week's backgrounder blog post on budget reconciliation, we said that the process has been used 22 times in the past, with the President having...