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.
Do Americans Really Favor a Revenue-Only Approach to Social Security Reform?
The National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) released a survey last week ( see video of CRFB President Maya MacGuineas at the release event)...
CBO Report Parses the Reasons for Part D's Slow Growth
The last few months have seen a number of new ideas to save money in Part D of Medicare by encouraging more efficient use of drugs by prescription...
McCarthy Suggests Increased Focus on Long-Term Budgeting
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tells Politico that his priorities for the next Congress include the budget process, and in particular...
Erskine Bowles: Urgency of Federal Deficit Remains
Erskine Bowles is a former co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Commission and member of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He wrote an...
Social Security is A Little Bit Harder to Secure
Social Security's finances are far from secure, and every year that Congress waits before addressing the problem makes it harder to fix. This week...
Why the 40-Year Average is a Poor Benchmark
In response to Howard Gleckman's piece on the FY 2014 deficit where he noted that the budget had returned to "normal," Donald Marron wrote that the...
SSDI Hearings Running Behind
Although the Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Patent Office are infamous among federal agencies for the long wait times and lines, their backlogs pale in...
CAP Report Warns Against Turning War Spending Into a Slush Fund
The Center for American Progress' Katherine Blakeley and Lawrence Korb recently issued a report recommending how lawmakers should wind down war...
Coburn Publishes Wastebook 2014
Year after year, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) refuses to simply give lip service to "wasteful government spending" and has instead called out...
Medicare's Slowdown: A Story About Part D
In a Health Affairs blog post, CRFB's Loren Adler and Adam Rosenberg find that most of the recent slowdown in Medicare's costs is attributable to the...
Maya MacGuineas: Yes, the Deficit Is Smaller. But That Wasn’t the Main Problem.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, wrote a commentary that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Washington...
How CBO Accounts for Anti-Fraud Efforts
Fraud -- along with the closely related waste and abuse -- is too often cited as a big factor affecting our high deficits, even though this is not the...