Budget Matters Blog

Category: Budget Process

What would the next generation do with $1 trillion?

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Posted: | Budget Process

It seems that these days, everyone has an opinion about how our federal budget should be spent, cut or balanced.     Youth are disproportionately affected by budget cuts, but often don't have a voice in the debate -- until now.   The American Friends Service Committee and National Priorities Project ...

Money Out—Also, Money In

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Posted: | Budget Process, Transparency & Data

There’s so much talk these days about federal deficits and cutting spending. So we at NPP thought it would be good to talk about tax revenues—the other half of the budget picture—and not just about spending (For some background on how the budget works, check out the People’s Guide to ...

Sunlight Makes Government Accountable

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Posted: | Budget Process

Sunlight Foundation is working for a "Super Committee" process that is more transparent and has developed five recommendations: Provide a live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings Make available the Committee's report for 72 hours before a final committee vote Disclose every meeting held with lobbyists and other powerful ...

What the Bush Tax Cuts Cost

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Posted: | Budget Process, Debt & Deficit

$1,034,401,772,556. That’s the cost to the U.S. Treasury since 2001 from Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans—as of the moment I started writing this blog post. National Priorities Project and Citizens for Tax Justice today released CostOfTaxCuts.com, a site that has a real-time ticker showing the ...

Taking Back the American Dream

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Posted: | Budget Process

This week I (Mattea Kramer, research analyst here at NPP) traveled to Washington to the Take Back the American Dream conference. What did I learn? I learned that the American Dream Movement is about Shannon McLeish and others like her. Shannon and I ate cheese quesadillas together on Monday night. ...

Build a Better Budget: Send Your Priorities To Congress Today

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Posted: | Budget Process

Right now our elected officials are trying to balance the federal budget on the backs of the most marginalized Americans. This crusade to drag government into the bathroom and drown it will, over time, result in the erosion or near eradication of programs that safeguard our collective well-being. Four years ...

Kyle Announces NPP's "One (Bumpy) Year in the Life of the Federal Budget" – and Some Fun Stuff

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Posted: | Budget Process

Followers of "Ask Kyle" may be surprised to see this, as our good friend and colleague Kyle Andrejczyk posted his last post on September 12. But so many people found Kyle's work to be so helpful in explaining the craziness that went on this summer in Washington around the federal ...

We hear you Mr. Norquist but we will not yield!

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Posted: | Budget Process

Here we go again. For the second year in a row, Congress will not complete the federal budget process in time for the October 1 turn of the fiscal year. Last year, we were dragged through eight painful continuing resolutions lasting until mid-April – leading ultimately to decreases – largely ...

Deficit Reduction or Class Warfare?

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Posted: | Budget Process, Social Insurance, Earned Benefits, & Safety Net

Obama's speech in the Rose Garden on Monday outlined his proposal to control deficit spending, which features the “Buffet Rule” to ensure that households earning over $1 million do not pay a lower tax rate than middle-class Americans. Critics of Obama's plan called this class warfare. But in today's flagging ...

The Scoop on the American Jobs Act of 2011

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Posted: | Budget Process, Debt & Deficit, Education, Health Care, Military & Security, Social Insurance, Earned Benefits, & Safety Net, Transparency & Data

President Obama presented the American Jobs Act of 2011 on September 8th and sent it to Congress on September 12th. Want to know what it's all about? Here’s the rundown. How does it help… the unemployed? It makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against unemployed job applicants because of ...