Trillion | featured news

Thanks to lax international tax rules the world’s super rich have siphoned at least $21 trillion into secretive tax-free havens, according to a study by UK campaign group Tax Justice Network.

We thought we’d dodged a bullet. When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that student loan debt had passed the $1 trillion mark my first thought was one of relief since our last child is graduating from college next month. Even though his tuition has almost doubled during his tenure as a student at the University of California, we were fortunate that he will be able to graduate without student loan debt. That may change in the future if he decides to complete a graduate degree, but my husband and I wiped our brows with a collective sigh of relief.

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....

In the last two years, we have spent a huge sum of money on infrastructure — one kind of infrastructure. Infrastructure — that’s the stuff we know is important but unsexy. The asparagus of investment. But these infrastructure numbers are anything but unsexy: In two years, we’ve spent $57.4 billion on this one style of invisible system.

The federal government recorded a $1.3 trillion budget deficit in fiscal 2011, the same as the previous fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said.

President Barack Obama will release a plan on Monday calling for more than $3 trillion in deficit cuts over 10 years, with about half of the savings coming from higher taxes on the wealthy and big corporations.

The federal deficit will hit $1.3 trillion for fiscal 2011, the third consecutive year of record shortfalls and an emerging campaign theme for GOP attacks on President Obama and congressional Democrats. The deficits of the last three years are at levels unseen since World War II and stem from the "long shadow" cast on the economy by the financial crisis and recession, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The Senate gave final approval Tuesday to legislation to raise the nation's debt limit by $2.4 trillion while cutting federal deficits, sending President Obama a hard-fought bipartisan package he was expected to swiftly sign into law.

June 17 marks the 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of war on drugs, an effort that has cost the US $1 trillion to date. What have we gotten for our investment? Not much that's good.

The Treasury has told lawmakers a roughly $2 trillion increase in the legal limit on U.S. federal debt was needed to ensure the government can keep borrowing through the 2012 presidential election, sources with knowledge of the discussions said.