Budget Matters Blog


Immigration Reform Would Save Uncle Sam $197 Billion Over Next 10 Years

According to a report just released by the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill would reduce federal budget deficits by $197 billion over the next decade.


What Is Sequestration and How Will It Affect Me?

By now you've heard that federal budget cuts will take effect on Friday. And you've heard the strange-sounding name for these cuts: sequestration. No one thought the cuts would actually take effect, but now – it is near certain – they will, and the fallout will reach all of us.


The Fiscal Cliff Deal

At the last possible moment, Congress came to an agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff. The deal affects tax rates, unemployment benefits, and even the price of milk. Read the details.


A People's Guide... To The Debt Ceiling

Recently the notion of the "debt ceiling" has been appearing in the news. It's making a comeback after spending months in the spotlight last summer, when the federal government nearly shut down as federal debt reached the legal limit. (Lawmakers ultimately raised the limit in the eleventh hour.) Currently, it is projected that the federal debt will hit the new debt ceiling sometime before the end of 2012. To once again avoid a government shutdown, lawmakers will again have to raise the debt ceiling, which is now set at $16.4 trillion.


Priority Number Two: Cut Spending

In a recent blog my colleague Mattea noted that a February poll by the Hill of likely voters found that the top priority for 45 percent of respondents was "job creation." In close second, with 40 percent, was "cutting spending." Support for cutting government spending is certainly the result of ...

Goodbye to All That: Super Committee Fails (But it might not matter)

November 23rd is the deadline for the super committee, officially named the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. They’ve all but announced failure to come up with even $1 of their $1.2 trillion deficit reduction task. Since the creation of the super committee, we’ve been hearing there would be automatic, ...

Money Out—Also, Money In

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 ...

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

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 ...

Deficit Reduction or Class Warfare?

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 ...

“Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy:” Where We are Right Now with the Debt Deal*

Everybody wants to reduce the deficit, right? Elected officials across the political spectrum, business  and labor groups, even 81% of everyday Americans (according to a poll by the Pew Research Center) — all would like to see the federal deficit reduced. The thing is, it's incredibly difficult to get all ...