Budget

Kansas or California as a Model for America’s Future Growth?

By The Fiscal Times Staff

If you had to choose either Kansas or California to serve as a model for America’s future growth, which would it be, Bloomberg’s Barry Ritholtz asks . The answer, he argues, is obvious — yet...
Kamala Harris' Trillion-Dollar Tax Plan

By Michael Rainey

Republicans aren’t the only ones coming up with trillion-dollar tax plans. California’s Kamala Harris, a rising Democratic star in the Senate, released a proposal Thursday to repeal the $1.9 trillion...
McConnell: Entitlement Cuts Probably Won’t Happen Under Trump

By Yuval Rosenberg

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) unleashed a storm of Democratic criticism earlier this week by telling Bloomberg News that rising deficits and debt are driven by Social Security,...
Trump Wants Federal Agencies to Cut Spending by 5%

By Michael Rainey and Yuval Rosenberg

President Trump instructed his cabinet secretaries Wednesday to reduce their departmental spending by 5 percent or more next year. “Some of you will say, ‘Hey, I can do much more than five,’” Trump...
Hurricane Michael Might Have Damaged More Than $1 Billion Worth of F-22s

By Michael Rainey

By the time Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle last week, most of the aircraft based at Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City had been flow out of harm’s way. But between four and 17 F-22...

Federal Deficit Jumps 17 Percent to $779 Billion

By Yuval Rosenberg

Despite a strong economy and robust job market, the federal budget deficit swelled to $779 billion in fiscal 2018, up $113 billion from 2017, according to final numbers released Monday by the...
Mnuchin Spins a False Claim About Tax Cuts and the Deficit

By Yuval Rosenberg

The Congressional Budget Office projected last week that the federal government’s fiscal 2018 deficit would total $782 billion. The final numbers will be released by the Treasury Department, but...
Pentagon Grounds All F-35s

By Michael Rainey

The U.S. Defense Department grounded all F-35 jets on Thursday, on the heels of a crash on September 28 in South Carolina. Investigators examining the loss of an F-35B, the Marine Corps’ version of...
Trump’s Border Wall: A Christmastime Clash Is Coming

By Yuval Rosenberg

There won’t be much holiday cheer on Capitol Hill this year, Politico’s Playbook warns : “Over the last few days, we’ve seen a massive ramp-up of the ‘build-the-wall’ rhetoric from key Hill...
How GOP Rhetoric on Entitlements Has Changed

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The Washington Post’s David Weigel describes how Republicans have changed their tune on Medicare and, for this year at least, largely abandoned the idea of entitlement reform: “[O]ver eight years,...

Deficit Soaring in 2018

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The federal deficit was 32 percent larger in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2018 than it was during the same time period in 2017, the Congressional Budget Office announced Monday. The deficit...
The Cost of War Since 9/11

By Michael Rainey

The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have cost the U.S. more than $1.5 trillion, according to Department of Defense data reported by CNCB Monday. The Pentagon report covers war-related operational...
Tax Cuts 2.0: What’s in the GOP Plan and Why It Matters

By Yuval Rosenberg

With an eye toward November’s midterm elections, House Republicans on Monday unveiled legislation to make permanent the individual tax cuts and pass-through business deductions that were set to...
Pentagon Investing Billions in Next-Generation AI

By Michael Rainey

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, plans to spend more than $2 billion over the next five years to develop artificial intelligence technologies for military use. DARPA...
Obama: 'Suddenly Deficits Do Not Matter'

By Yuval Rosenberg

Former President Barack Obama stepped back into the political fray on Friday, delivering a blistering rebuke of President Trump and the Republican Party while signaling how he plans to campaign on...