You will not find this information on Fox News.
***
Federal budget deficit falls to smallest level since 2008. "Closing the books on a fiscal year in which the federal budget deficit fell more sharply than in any year since the end of World War II, the Treasury Department reported on Thursday that the deficit for 2013 dropped to $680 billion, from about $1.1 trillion the previous year. In nominal terms, that is the smallest deficit since 2008, and signals the end of a five-year stretch beginning with the onset of the recession when the country's fiscal gap came in at more than $1 trillion each year. As a share of the nation's economy, the budget deficit fell to about 4.1 percent, from a high of more than 10 percent during the depths of the Great Recession." Annie Lowrey in The New York Times.
The nation's budget wars have reduced the deficit by $3.3 trillion. "The endless rounds of deficit reduction in Washington in recent years have significantly improved the nation's budget outlook, reducing projected borrowing by $3.3 trillion through 2024, according to new estimates by Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.)...As this chart from Murray shows, the discretionary budget, which funds the Pentagon and other agencies, will absorb nearly half of the cuts, or $1.6 trillion...A quarter of the impact comes from the higher taxes on the wealthy that were adopted during the fiscal cliff fight. And another 20 percent comes from not borrowing as much and not having to pay more than $700 billion in interest that otherwise would have accrued. Mandatory programs, which include Social Security and Medicare, were barely nicked, meanwhile, accounting for just 7 percent of overall savings." Lori Montgomery in The Washington Post.
Wall Street hates Dave Camp. "Private equity and investment firms in New York are telling key Republican players in D.C. that commitments for big-dollar fundraising have been "canceled for the foreseeable future," according to one GOP lobbyist with knowledge of the conversations...Big banks want to turn Republicans against the bank tax. The situation puts the party at risk of seeing a reliable source of campaign cash dry up right in the middle of a critical election year. The tax proposal itself is not even expected to get a vote in the House, since it's so unpopular among most Republicans. That Wall Street would react so ferociously to a dead-end bill is a reminder of how hard a powerful player is willing to fight to protect its interests in Washington." Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and Lauren French in Politico.
CHAIT: Now this is a Republican tax reform plan. "The tax-reform proposal unveiled yesterday by Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, does something remarkable: It actually reforms the tax code. It doesn't use the pretense of reform to shift the tax burden off the rich, as Republican "tax reform" plans usually do, and it does not use hand-waving to gesture in the direction of reform without following through. Camp has actually plunged his hands into the guts of the tax code and pulled out item after item. It may be the most impressive and ambitious domestic policy proposal crafted by a major Republican in a generation." Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine.
PONNURU: Dave Camp's one huge tax problem. "It imposes a new tax on a few banks with a large number of assets. This tax is not completely unjustified: It's billed as a way of offsetting the advantage these firms get from being considered candidates for bailouts in the event they run into trouble. But is this the right way to fix that problem? Shouldn't we base the tax on liabilities rather than assets, if we're trying to tackle the too-big-to-fail problem?" Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.
No comments:
Post a Comment