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Opinion: America's Unquenchable Defense Spending
By Michael Cohen - AOL News(July 20) -- If there's one issue that seems to unite an increasingly divided and fractured capital, it is the ever-expanding federal budget deficit. Everyone seems wants to curb Washington's appetite for spending. Except one area of the federal budget is seemingly off limits: the $692 billion elephant in the room -- America's defense budget. The calls from Republicans and Democrats for belt-tightening rarely, if ever, seem to extend to the military. Deficit hawks in the House have even demanded that an amendment to the $37 billion Afghanistan spending bill that would allocate $10 billion to ...
Strapped States Cash In on Gambling and Other Vices
By Christopher Weber - Politics DailyStates faced with budget shortfalls in the billions of dollars are changing their tunes about how they generate revenue for law enforcement and other public services, condoning activities such as gambling that were restricted in the past. In Ohio, residents recently voted to allow casinos, and Gov. Ted Strickland dropped his longtime opposition to video lottery machines, proposing to add them to racetracks to generate new funds, The Wall Street Journal reported. "If I had not been confronted with these difficult circumstances, I would have obviously opposed expanding gambling in Ohio," ...
Obama, Tax Increases and Debt Reduction: How GOP Can Avoid Political Trap
By Peter Wehner - Politics DailyPresident Obama is in the early stages of setting a political trap for the GOP -- one he hopes will take one of his greatest weaknesses and turn it into a strength. The weakness Obama has is that he is viewed as fiscally reckless by much of the electorate, having engineered an unprecedented spending binge even before he passed into law a hugely expensive new entitlement program in health care. At a time when the deficit and debt are more potent political issues than ever, and when those who are viewed as responsible for them are more vulnerable than ever, Obama and Democrats in Congress are ...
Debate: Do We Need a New Way to Tax Citizens?
By not in system - AOL News(April 14) -- With worries about chronic massive budget deficits and economy-destroying national debt mounting, talk about a new "value-added tax" has grown increasingly loud. White House economic adviser Paul Volcker last week said the U.S. should consider a VAT, which is commonly imposed in European countries, and the Congressional Budget Office head noted that he's been getting a "lot of questions" from lawmakers about the VAT. Is a VAT -- which would impose a tax at each step of a product's production chain as value gets added -- a good idea? AOL News asked experts with different ...
Debate: Don't Take Anything Off the Table
By not in system - AOL News(April 14) -- Editor's note: This piece is excerpted from the current issue of National Affairs. Everyone understands that the federal government's finances are a mess and that policymakers have failed to take the problem seriously. "Paying for what you spend is basic common sense," President Barack Obama quipped in June. "Perhaps that's why, here in Washington, it's been so elusive." Unfortunately, this familiar punch line is no longer a laughing matter: The explosion of borrowing in the past two years, and the prospect of unrelenting deficits in the next decade and beyond, portend the ...
Lower Deficit Projected, Thanks to More Tax Dollars, Less Bailout Spending
By Tom Diemer - Politics DailyHigher tax income and lower spending on the financial system bailout is raising hope that the federal budget deficit -- the gaping difference between what government takes in and what it lays out -- will be lower than expected this year. The Obama administration believes if the trend continues, the deficit could be $300 million lower than its earlier bet -- still a whopping $1.3 trillion, but a sign deficit-spending may have bottomed out, the Washington Post reported. For the first half of the year, it is running 8 percent below the deficit over the same period in 2009, the newspaper ...
Drowning in Red Ink: Deficit Hit Record Level in February
By Tom Diemer - Politics DailyFederal government coffers have shown deficits for 17 straight months, but this one was a whopper. The U.S. budget deficit hit $220.9 billion in February, a one-month record, the Treasury Department says. That was up -- or down -- from the previous record a year ago, almost $194 billion in February 2009, CNN reported. The last monthly surplus showed up in September 2008, a relatively puny $45.7 billion. The February losses were actually lower than some economists predicted, according to the market analyst Briefing.com. As the government spends its way to a 2010 deficit likely to exceed $1.5 ...
If Past Is Guide, Debt Commission Chiefs Agree on Little
By Russell Berman - AOL NewsWASHINGTON (Feb. 18) -- Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have the unenviable task of getting an 18-member commission and then a majority of Congress to agree on an unpopular combination of tax hikes and spending cuts that are likely needed to rein in the nation's enormous deficit. If their records are a guide, they may have a tough time just agreeing with each other. The two men President Obama named to lead a bipartisan fiscal panel have deep experience with the entitlement programs, chiefly Social Security and Medicare, that economists say are driving the trillion-dollar deficits for the ...
After Congress Punts, Obama Names Deficit Panel
By Russell Berman - AOL NewsWASHINGTON (Feb. 18) -- A former Republican senator from Wyoming and a Democratic former chief of staff to Bill Clinton will lead a presidential commission charged with recommending solutions to the nation's soaring deficit, President Obama announced Thursday morning. The president tapped Alan Simpson, who represented Wyoming from 1979 to 1997 and rose to become the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, and Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff from 1996 to 1998, to head the fiscal panel, which Obama established by executive order after the Senate rejected an attempt to create the ...
Opinion: President's Budget Is a Start, at Least
By not in system - AOL News(Feb. 1) -– The president's budget elevates the issue of fiscal responsibility (good), but fails to achieve it (not good). President Obama proposes spending $3.8 trillion next year and borrowing $1.3 trillion of that. The massive deficits the nation now faces would gradually fall to $706 billion in 2014, before rising back to just over $1 trillion by 2020. Among the larger deficit-reducing proposals in the budget are a three-year nonsecurity discretionary spending freeze, which would save $250 billion over 10 years; a fee on large financial institutions designed to pay back the TARP ...
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