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.
CBO Joins the Cliff Estimating Game
Estimates of the fiscal cliff that is set to occur at the end of the year have been popping up in recent weeks. Now CBO has lended its voice to the...
Line Items: Social Network Edition
Much Not to ‘Like’ – Facebook had its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday. The hype surrounding the offering illustrated the prominence of social...
A Lively Debate on the Affordable Care Act
Yesterday, Medicare trustee Charles Blahous and former chief economist for Vice President Biden Jared Bernstein had a debate about the fiscal...
A Progressive Retirement Age?
Yesterday, Zeke Emanuel advanced an interesting proposal for Social Security and Medicare in a blog at The New York Times: varying the retirement ages...
Tax Policy Center Event Discusses Taxes on the Financial Sector
When discussing new types of revenue or tax structures for the federal government to consider the other month, we touched on financial sector taxes as...
House GOP Floats 2-Stage Process for Tax Reform
Via the Washington Post, it seems that the House majority is looking at creating a fast track procedure for passing tax reform in 2013. This will...
Fixing Medicare Double-Counting
Donald Marron, who recently wrote a blog post on how budget limits are treated in Congressional rules, wrote a piece today detailing how Medicare Part...
What the U.S. Could Learn from Germany
Steep budget cuts are linked to recession and higher unemployment in Europe, argue several commentators (see here for example). Are they right...
How Big is the Fiscal Cliff?
UPDATE: This blog has been updated to include CBO's brief about the fiscal cliff. About a month ago, we reported our estimates of how much the fiscal...
No Surprise: Fiscal Cliff Causing A Lot of Uncertainty
We have been warning for a few months now about the potential consequences of the fiscal cliff -- and adding to the debt by averting it all together...
Bill Clinton Joins the Announcement Effect Club
Former President Bill Clinton joined the Announcement Effect Club at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's Fiscal Summit yesterday in a Q&A session with...
Erskine Bowles' Message Hits Home
On Sunday, Fiscal Commission co-chair and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles delivered a speech at American University's School of...