Issue Briefs

The trustees of Medicare and Social Security issued their annual reports last week, providing further evidence of the need for substantial reforms of the big entitlement programs that make up over a third of the federal budget.As in past years,…

As the President and Congress consider deficit reduction options and an increase in the debt limit, budget process proposals have recently become popular on Capitol Hill. (more…)

Under Paul Ryan’s budget plan, the country’s three big entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – would make up a larger share of non-interest federal spending than they would under the budget President Obama proposed earlier this year.It…

* Updated based on the CBO Preliminary Analysis of the President’s Budget released on March 18 As the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan faces a daunting task in producing a budget resolution that satisfies the policy goals…

Washington’s money problems make it all the more important for individual Americans to plan responsibly for their own financial futures. At the same time, elected officials have no time to lose in confronting the fiscal challenges imposed by an aging…

President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget is not a bold policy proposal. It is an oddly complacent budget for a situation that requires anything but complacency.Faced with a growing chorus of warnings from official and unofficial sources that we are…

Citing the country’s “extreme fiscal duress,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week said the administration would cut $78 billion from its five-year defense plan. The Pentagon budget would still continue to grow above inflation for the next three years, however.Gates…

After John Boehner (R-OH) was formally elected speaker of the House of Representatives last week, the first order of business was approving rules to govern the House during the 112th Congress. The House quickly adopted a rules package making several…