The government promised $27.5 billion in stimulus funds to help fix the nation's crumbling roads and bridges as part of a broader effort to save jobs. The effort is working...sort of.
New estimates of the federal deficit leave many questions unanswered but underscore one cold fact of life in Washington right now: Boosting the economy without making an already bad deficit worse is really hard to do.
In just over a month, the federal government's fiscal year will draw to a close, leaving in its wake one of the biggest annual deficits in U.S. history -- and a forecast of more record debt to come.
The nation's economy is starting to rebound, but the Obama administration's massive stimulus package had little to do with it.
The health reform bills released so far would increase government spending on health care without sufficiently reining in health care costs.
Fiscally-stressed states are using their stimulus dollars to satisfy immediate needs rather than undertake longer-term reforms, according to a government report released Wednesday.
President Obama urged Congress to adopt a "pay-as-you-go" approach to federal spending in order to restore fiscal discipline, but critics say the president's call lacks credibility.
The federal budget deficit surged in May, bringing the total shortfall for this fiscal year to nearly $1 trillion, government figures showed Wednesday.
The economy will start growing in the second half of 2009, but it will be several years before the positive effects of a turnaround will be felt, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday.
In the context of a $3.5 trillion budget, a $1 million proposed cut might not seem like much. But for one small foundation, the impact could be shattering.
The government promised $27.5 billion in stimulus funds to help fix the nation's crumbling roads and bridges as part of a broader effort to save jobs. The effort is working...sort of.
New estimates of the federal deficit leave many questions unanswered but underscore one cold fact of life in Washington right now: Boosting the economy without making an already bad deficit worse is really hard to do.
In just over a month, the federal government's fiscal year will draw to a close, leaving in its wake one of the biggest annual deficits in U.S. history -- and a forecast of more record debt to come.
The nation's economy is starting to rebound, but the Obama administration's massive stimulus package had little to do with it.
The health reform bills released so far would increase government spending on health care without sufficiently reining in health care costs.
Fiscally-stressed states are using their stimulus dollars to satisfy immediate needs rather than undertake longer-term reforms, according to a government report released Wednesday.
President Obama urged Congress to adopt a "pay-as-you-go" approach to federal spending in order to restore fiscal discipline, but critics say the president's call lacks credibility.
The federal budget deficit surged in May, bringing the total shortfall for this fiscal year to nearly $1 trillion, government figures showed Wednesday.
The economy will start growing in the second half of 2009, but it will be several years before the positive effects of a turnaround will be felt, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday.
In the context of a $3.5 trillion budget, a $1 million proposed cut might not seem like much. But for one small foundation, the impact could be shattering.
President Obama on Thursday offered a more detailed look at his 2010 budget proposal, which includes recommendations to cut funding for 121 federal programs and save $17 billion in 2010.
The White House on Thursday will detail a proposal to save $17 billion next year by eliminating or reducing 121 federal programs, according to a senior administration official.
Congress approved a $3.4 trillion budget for the coming year Wednesday, approving most of President Obama's key spending priorities including increasing in health care, education and alternative energy spending.
House and Senate Democrats reached agreement late Monday on a budget resolution for 2010, which includes key spending priorities for the young Obama administration.
Rural America is about to get gold-plated broadband service, if the results of a recent survey of telecommunications companies are to be believed.
Listen closely and you'll hear squeals of disgust from a watchdog group tracking congressional pork in the nation's capital.
The government said Friday the federal budget deficit for the first half of fiscal 2009 jumped to $956.8 billion, more than $500 billion above the gap for all of the prior fiscal year.
"Who controls the past controls the future."
The Senate passed a $3.53 trillion version of the federal budget for fiscal year 2010 late Thursday night in a party-line vote, ending several weeks of acrimonious partisan debate.
It's not that easy to turn down federal funds.
A tightened version of President Obama's $3.6 trillion budget moved through a key Senate committee Thursday night.
House Republicans on Thursday said they have come up with an alternative proposal to the president's budget, following criticism from Democrats that they have become the "party of no."
President Obama huddled with Senate Democrats on Capitol Hill Wednesday as the White House fought to save major domestic priorities in its record $3.6 trillion budget from the congressional budget ax.
The fight on Capitol Hill over next year's federal budget begins in earnest on Wednesday, when the Senate and House Budget Committees will debate just how much they want to spend and tax in 2010.
Hours before President Obama was to hold a prime time news conference -- in part to boost his $3.6 trillion budget plan -- a key Democratic senator Tuesday unveiled a scaled-down budget proposal.
The U.S. budget deficit in 2009 is projected to spike to between $1.67 trillion and $1.85 trillion, according to estimates released Friday by the Congressional Budget Office.
Foreign purchases of U.S. debt increased in the first month of 2009, according to a Treasury report released Monday, easing some concerns that overseas investors have lost their appetite for U.S. debt.
President Obama on Wednesday called for a reform of the much-maligned federal earmarking process.
President Obama's "new era of responsibility" has already drawn criticism as a magician's math act: Add a trillion-dollar universal health care plan to a trillion-dollar (including interest) stimulus package to another quarter-trillion for bank bailouts to 7% average increases in domestic agency spending and -- voila! --the federal deficit drops by half in four years.
Two Senate Democrats urged President Obama Wednesday to veto a $410 billion spending bill and said they are going to vote against it, criticizing it for its cost and for including too many personal pet projects.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer declared Tuesday that Congress, not President Obama, will decide whether to put more limits on earmarks in upcoming spending bills.
President Barack Obama pledged Monday to cut the nation's $1.3 trillion deficit in half by the end of his first term.
If you're looking for Peter Orszag, you might check between a rock and a hard place.
Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina took umbrage at my writing that his approach to the economic crisis is to do nothing. I'll deal with his "ideas" in a moment, but first let me make a modest proposal:
President Obama's newly revamped Office of Faith Based Initiatives is reigniting a contentious debate across the ideological spectrum over whether religious organizations that accept funds from the government should be allowed to discriminate when hiring.
President-elect Barack Obama is inheriting the worst economy in decades and says he'll need to "invest an extraordinary amount of money" to get it back on track.
President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday nominated Peter Orszag to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the president's chief number-crunching department, and said he sees "tough choices" ahead in determining programs to keep or cut.
Two weeks ago in midtown Manhattan, time stood still -- literally. After the country's debt surpassed $10 trillion, the marquee-sized debt clock in Times Square, which has kept a running tally of the U.S. national debt for nearly 20 years, ran out of digits. For a nation already struggling with a bleak economic reality, it was a less-than-reassuring display. Several news organizations quipped about such a literal "sign of the times," while the satiricial newspaper The Onion offered its own brand of gallows humor: "If everyone just donated one dollar, we would have enough money to buy a new clock."Luckily, citizens won't have to pitch in. New York real estate firm The Durst Organization, which owns and operates the clock, plans to install an updated model sometime next year that can display a quadrillion dollars. In the meantime, the company has hacked the current display to provide a temporary solution -- replacing the dollar sign at the front of the number number with an extra digit.
President Bush on Monday signed a bill that will pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the remainder of his presidency and into spring 2009.
The candidate told "forgotten" America that big government isn't the answer, but his message wasn't aimed only at them
Last year Sen. Barack Obama, submitted a laundry list of federal funding requests, known as earmarks, to the Senate Appropriations Committee: 112 earmarks totaling more than $330 million in taxpayer funds.
In tiny Bishop, California, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California, wants to build a museum honoring the mule.
With his poll numbers in the tank, the President seems to be gearing up for a veto fight with Congress over a long forgotten issue -- controlling spending
He has recently made stops in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, giving speeches and holding town hall meetings. But he's not seeking the presidency.
The following is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's testimony before the House Budget Committee on Wednesday:
George W. Bush seldom suffered personally from doing what's unpopular politically. In fact, you could argue that he has made a career of it, holding fast to positions that many voters reject, as a sign of strength in these dangerous times. So his willingness to exercise his first-ever veto this week on a bill that would expand federal funding for human embryonic-stem-cell research, which 2 out of 3 voters favor, is not just a way to stroke his political base. "People like leadership much better than a finger in the wind," says White House press secretary Tony Snow. As Bush explained to him while in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the G-8 summit last week, "I took a position. I believe in it. So that's what I'm going to do."
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Do you live in a "donor" state?
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Who's afraid of the big bad federal budget deficit? Not the bond or currency markets.
The senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee said Saturday that President Bush is "passing on a crippling and growing debt to our children and grandchildren."
Following is a copy of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's prepared remarks for testimony before the House Budget Committee Wednesday, as posted on the Fed's Web site.
The dollar rallied to a two-month high against the yen as hopes for a Chinese revaluation of the yuan faded. The greenback also built on gains verses the euro in light of a U.S. budget proposal that is seen by some as a serious effort to tackle the deficit problem.
The White House conceded Monday it will likely have to borrow money to pay for the president's proposal to create private accounts for younger workers to revamp Social Security.
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- Forget all the snide knocks at the eccentric Texas billionaire, Ross Perot proved conclusively in his 1992 independent run for the presidency that even a losing candidate, with a strong message, can profoundly change national policy.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned the U.S. must deal with the causes of the weak dollar -- the U.S. trade deficit and the federal budget deficit -- or the country could run into economic problems down the line.
There is an important question that, if asked of either presidential candidate during the upcoming debates, is guaranteed to elicit an evasive nonanswer. It goes something like this: "All the fisca...
Are the budget deficits, the national debt and the financial problems of the Social Security system smoke and mirrors -- that is, something our "all talk and no action" politicians just like to squabble about? Or are they something we really need to worry about?
Calling it a "high priority," President Bush on Wednesday asked Congress for an additional $25 billion to cover military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even partisan Republicans have expressed deep skepticism about President Bush's budget's fiscal responsibility--or lack thereof. Joshua Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, ...
When Alan Greenspan testified before congress in mid-February, the Fed chairman delivered a Valentine's Day garland to the recent performance of the U.S. economy, lauding the "stunning increases in...
Who doesn't love low interest rates?
The economy is surging, unemployment is shrinking, and the Dow has reconquered 10,000. So why then is Robert Rubin convinced the sky is falling?
If you want to rile Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, just suggest that the Social Security system is in dire straits.
Just Moments after President Clinton presented his Social Security reform plan during his State of the Union address, Republican Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn of Washington went on camera to deliver ...
THIS MONTH:
When did big government begin? Conservatives of all ages tend to think federal spending went out of control around their tenth birthday. Commentators who have a little more historical perspective t...
APRIL 1996 MAY MARK THE BEGINNING OF the end of the Social Security system as Americans have known it for 60 years. Sometime this spring, the Clinton Administration's 13-member Advisory Council on ...
If we have learned anything from the 30 years of frustration since we declared war on poverty, it should be this: You can't fix the problem if you don't understand it. Strategies founded on oversim...
Amid all the confusion, here are at least six things you can count on from Bill Clinton's revolutionary -- and still evolutionary -- economic plan.
CHANCES ARE that the current decade has not been particularly kind to you. Even if you are not among the millions whose jobs vanished, you may be covering for a slew of fallen colleagues and workin...
YOU SAY you've heard enough about the federal budget deficit? You know it will come to roughly $314 billion in fiscal 1992? You know the national debt grew from nearly $1 trillion ten years ago to ...
Last April, a new job enabled Leland and Kathy Rhodes to flee the gathering gloom of tax hell in California for the pristine uplands of tax heaven in Wyoming. Today, as the $60,000-a-year chief fin...
IS THERE an economic phenomenon more frustrating than the federal budget deficit? For a decade it has mocked us, defying all efforts to eliminate it -- from the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985, w...
AMERICA ENTERS the 1990s bristling with opportunity. The spread of pluralistic, democratic capitalism -- a victory for American ideals and policy -- promises a world bound more tightly together, la...
Inflation has come too close to a boil for comfort, and any hopes have faded for a quick agreement to trim the federal deficit. Each of these developments is a worry for the economy during the comi...
The best way for the federal government to get its financial house in order? Increase the gasoline tax, substantially. Most proponents of this idea cite the need for more federal revenue and the vi...
ENTER the strange world of Social Security, as exotically inside out as the domain of black holes and anti-matter that physicists describe. Within the borders of this unexpected land the U.S. runs ...
LAST MONTH'S 100-point drop in the Dow, triggered by disappointing news about the U.S. trade deficit, was a glint on the sword that hangs over the world financial system. In another month or so, Am...
''Our goal, which is a goal we think we can achieve during fiscal year 1972, is to operate with a balanced budget.'' -- President Richard Nixon, July 1970 1972 federal budget deficit: $23.4 billion...
IN THE COMPASSION-PACKED Sixties and Seventies, welfare became a right, checks became grants, and social workers turned into ''human services technicians.'' But now the buzzword in the welfare bure...
The manner in which the federal government represents its financial condition is woefully misleading. For all the debate about the exact costs of items in the federal budget and the very precise de...
The American economy is shifting from a high-speed hustle to a sedate waltz, and the effects will be felt worldwide. Last year's roaring growth produced something for everyone. The recovery remaine...
POLITICIANS, pundits, and most economists have come to agree that the federal budget deficit is the paramount problem facing the U.S. By ''the deficit'' they no longer mean the difference between t...
The war on federal spending--at least the rhetorical war--will heat up in the coming months as President Reagan renews his call for the line item veto, the power for the President to veto individua...
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