Issue Briefs

Overview: Doubling the debt Every year the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issues a long-term budget outlook covering the next 30 years, assuming no changes in current law. This year’s report was released on September 21 and covered the years 2020…

Presidential budgets are designed to highlight an administration’s budgetary priorities, how they would affect the economy and how it all adds up. Budgets should be as transparent as possible so that members of Congress, the public and the media…

Introduction Recent reports from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have reiterated long-standing warnings that the federal budget suffers from a growing structural gap between projected spending and revenues. If left unaddressed, this structural…

Congress voted in February 2018 to again suspend the federal debt limit. On March 1, 2019, it went back into effect and was set at the level necessary to include all debt racked up prior to that date ($21.988 trillion). While…

Despite the inclination to do so, policymakers will not be able to quickly move on from health care after last week’s defeat of the House Republican health care plan. There are immediate steps that the Trump administration needs to take…

President-elect Donald Trump and the new Congress have many challenges to tackle. Hovering over all of them is our nation’s unsustainable fiscal policy. New proposals, whether on the spending or tax side of the budget, will not be credible if…

Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare while imposing a delay on replacement plans could prove to be fiscally problematic. From strictly a budgetary perspective, the “repeal and replace” plan being floated by Republicans can be viewed as simply an immediate $680…