Federal Budget | featured news

President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

Republicans are ready to ram through the House an election-year, $3.5 trillion budget that showcases their deficit-cutting plan for revamping Medicare and slicing everything from food stamps to transportation while rejecting President Barack Obama's call to raise taxes on the rich....

Despite discomfort in the Republican ranks, House and Senate negotiators reached a deal in principle early Thursday to extend a payroll tax break, continue unemployment benefits and ensure that Medicare doctors do not get a pay cut this year.

In a sharp turnaround, House Republican leaders Monday dropped a key demand that the cost of extending the payroll tax cut be offset by spending cuts elsewhere in the budget.

Congressional Republicans rejected President Obama’s $3.8 trillion spending outline as nothing more than a political document meant to guide his reelection campaign while putting off any of the tough decisions about ballooning red ink until after the voters have cast their ballots.

I love budgets. And not just because I love tables, charts and appendixes — though, to be clear, I do. I love budgets because they force us to run the numbers, to make trade-offs, to set priorities. The annual budget is, frankly, about as honest as the government ever gets with itself, and with the American people.

The tax plan by GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich would provide big tax breaks to the rich and blow a huge hole in the federal budget deficit, according to an independent study released Monday.

Americans blame the failure of the debt "super committee" on everyone involved, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday, despite the best efforts of Democrats and Republicans to point fingers at each other.

It's just about over for a special deficit-reduction supercommittee, which appears set to admit failure today in its quest to sop up at least $1.2 trillion in government red ink over the coming decade. The bipartisan 12-member panel is sputtering to a close after two months of talks in which key members and top congressional leaders never got close to bridging a fundamental divide over how much to raise taxes. The budget deficit forced the government to borrow 36 cents of every dollar it spent last year.

This is what a smaller government will look like: There will be less money for local cops, but more money for FBI agents. Less to repair public-housing complexes. More to feed hungry children. There will be less to fix polluted rivers. But more to fix crowded prisons.