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,...

Fingers Crossed on Those Killer Asteroids

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The Trump administration wants to give NASA more than $100 million to develop new techniques for fending off asteroids hurtling toward Earth, but Congress’s inability to get all of its spending bills...
Bye-Bye to Trump’s Border Wall?

By Yuval Rosenberg

President Trump indicated Wednesday that he won’t seek to shut down the government at the end of the month and would sign the spending bills sent to his desk by Congress. By doing so, he might be...
Plenty of DC Drama, Just Not About a Shutdown

By Yuval Rosenberg

The intensifying D.C. dramas this week over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s fate — both likely to crescendo on Thursday — are overshadowing a...
US F-35s Could See Combat Soon

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The U.S. may send its most expensive weapon system into combat in the coming weeks, according to Pentagon officials who spoke to CNN . The Marine Corps version of the stealth Lightning II – the F-35B...
Four States That Will Founder When the Next Recession Hits

By Orphe Divounguy

While the U.S. is enjoying stock market highs and steady GDP growth, the current economic expansion — which is currently in year 10 — can’t last forever. Many economists predict the next recession...