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“The Stealth Sequester”: Americans Are Starting To Feel The Pain, They Just Don’t Know It Yet

So far, the much-dreaded “sequester” – some $85 billion in federal spending cuts between March and September 30 – hasn’t been evident to most Americans.

The dire warnings that had issued from the White beforehand – threatening that Social Security checks would be delayed, airport security checks would be clogged, and other federal facilities closed – seem to have been overblown.

Sure, March’s employment report was a big disappointment. But it’s hard to see any direct connection between those poor job numbers and the sequester. The government has been shedding jobs for years. Most of the losses in March were from the Postal Service.

Take a closer look, though, and Americans are starting to feel the pain. They just don’t know it yet.

That’s because so much of what the government does affects the nation in local, decentralized ways. Federal funds find their way to community housing authorities, state unemployment offices, local school districts, private universities, and companies. So it’s hard for most Americans to know the sequester is responsible for the lost funding, lost jobs, or just plain inconvenience.

A tiny sampling: Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts is bracing for a cut of about $51 million in its $685 million of annual federal research grants and contracts. The public schools of Syracuse, New York, will lose over $1 million. The housing authority of Joliet, Illinois, will take a hit of nearly $900,000. Northrop Grumman Information Systems just issued layoff notices to 26 employees at its plant in Lawton, Oklahoma. Unemployment benefits are being cut in Pennsylvania and Utah.

The cuts — and thousands like them — are so particular and localized they don’t feel as if they’re the result of a change in national policy.

It’s just like what happened with the big federal stimulus of 2009 and 2010, but in reverse. Then, money flowed out to so many different places and institutions that most Americans weren’t aware of the stimulus program as a whole.

A second reason the sequester hasn’t been visible is a large share of the cuts are in programs directed at the poor – and America’s poor are often invisible.

For example, the Salt Lake Community Action Program recently closed a food pantry in Murray, Utah, serving more than 1,000 needy people every month. The Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium is closing a center that gives alcohol and drug treatment to Native Alaskans.

Some 1,700 poor families in and around Sacramento, California are likely to lose housing vouchers that pay part of their rents. More than 180 students are likely to be dropped from a Head Start program run by the Cincinnati-Hamilton County (Ohio) Community Action Agency.

Most Americans don’t know about these and other cuts because the poor live in different places than the middle class and wealthy. Poverty has become ever more concentrated geographically.

A third reason the sequester is invisible is many people whose jobs are affected by it are being “furloughed” rather than fired. “Furlough” is a euphemism for working shorter workweeks and taking pay cuts.

Two thousand civilian employees at the Army Research Lab in Maryland will be subject to one-day-per-week furloughs starting on April 22, for example, resulting in a 20 percent drop in pay. The Hancock Field Air National Guard Base is furloughing 280 workers. Many federal courts are now closed on Fridays.

Furloughs spread the pain. The hardship isn’t as evident as it would be if it came in the form of mass layoffs. But don’t fool yourself: A 20 percent pay cut is a huge burden for those who have to endure it.

Bear in mind, finally, the sequester is just starting. The sheer scale of it is guaranteed to make it far more apparent in coming months.

Some 140,000 low-income families will lose their housing vouchers, for example. Entire communities that depend mainly on defense-related industries or facilities will take major hits.

If you thought March’s job numbers were disappointing, just wait.

With the sequester, America has adopted austerity economics. Yet austerity economics is the wrong medicine at exactly the wrong time. Look what it’s done to Europe.

By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, April 8, 2013

April 10, 2013 Posted by | Sequester | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Poor People Don’t Just Disappear”: This Is What Happens When You Rip A Hole In The Safety Net

America’s social safety net, such as it is, has recently come under some scrutiny. Chana Joffe-Walt’s in-depth exploration of the increase in people getting Social Security Disability benefits at NPR got many listeners buzzing. Then in The Wall Street Journal, Damian Paletta and Caroline Porter looked at the increase in the use of food stamps, called SNAP. All three journalists look at the increasing dependence on these programs and come away puzzled: Why are so many people now getting disability and food stamp payments?

The answer is two-fold. Recent trends give us the first part of the explanation. Yes, as Paletta and Porter note, the economy is recovering and the unemployment rate is falling. But, as they recognize, the poverty rate is also rising. And therein lies the rub: people are getting jobs but staying poor. The available jobs are increasingly low-wage and don’t pay enough to live off of. And the big profits in the private sector haven’t led to an increase in wages.

GDP and employment may be doing well, but that hasn’t done much for those at the bottom of the totem pole. As the WSJ article points out, 48.5 million people were living in poverty in 2011, up from 37.3 million in 2007, a 30 percent increase. This is despite an unemployment rate that’s fallen off its peak. Some of the fall in the unemployment rate has been driven by people simply giving up on looking for a job altogether. But those who do get jobs are likely trading their once middle-class employment for low-wage work. The National Employment Law Project has found that mid-wage jobs have been wiped out during the recovery in favor of low-wage work: low paying jobs grew nearly three times as fast as mid-wage or high-wage work.

But there’s a deeper explanation that goes beyond the current economic picture. Aren’t there other programs for the increasing ranks of people living in poverty to turn to? Unfortunately, we’ve worked hard to weaken key parts of the safety net by changing how programs operate and then cutting back on their funds. Consequently, the number of people who are reached by programs for the poor has shrunk. But when you take away someone’s lifeline, they don’t stop needing it. So they either suffer hardship or find support elsewhere. What disability insurance and SNAP have in common is that they are fully funded by the federal government, which also can set the eligibility requirements. While states narrow eligibility requirements for TANF or unemployment insurance, the federal government can leave them (relatively) more open for SNAP and disability. That leaves them absorbing those who we’ve thrown off the rolls of other programs.

Unemployment benefits are where people turn when they lose a job and need income before getting back to work. But due to financial and other requirements, not everyone gets them. These rules vary state by state because states are in almost complete control of the program. They set their own eligibility criteria and benefit levels and are also on the hook for most of the funding for the benefits. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, “the federal government pays only the administrative costs.”

Unlike the federal government, states have constrained budgets and most have to balance them every year. These budgets get even tighter in a downturn when people lose jobs and don’t pay as many taxes. On top of this, states have come under pressure from business groups during good times to reduce the contributions they use to fund the reserves that pay out benefits when things get tough. So many states have cut back on eligibility or benefit amounts in light of squeezed budgets. Given all of these constraints on benefits, only about a third of all children whose parents were unemployed at some point in 2011 actually saw any unemployment insurance benefits. They were far more likely to get food stamps, a federally funded program that has been much more flexible.

This story of a program financed by states that hasn’t been able to keep up with demand is the same for another huge part of the social safety net: welfare, or as we know it now, TANF. TANF does even worse than unemployment: it reaches just 10 percent of the children living with unemployment parents and just 30 percent of those living in poverty. The program used to do much better: in 1996, it reached 70 percent of poor families with children living in poverty. But then there was welfare reform, which turned it from a cost-sharing model to a block grant. Rather than the federal government sharing the costs with the states, the government now doles out lumps of cash and mostly lets states handle the rest. That lump doesn’t change even if the economy gets worse and more people live in poverty—and hasn’t even kept up with inflation.

While welfare reformers initially claimed victory as rolls fell during a booming 90s economy, the numbers have continued to fall even as jobs have disappeared. The poverty rate among families is back up to 1996 levels, but TANF’s caseload has fallen by 60 percent since then.

These families aren’t magically de-impoverished when they’re kicked off of government support programs. So they either go hungry or find other means of support. Enter SNAP and disability. SNAP has grown by 45 percent to meet increased need in the poor economy. The federal government was able to increase funding and waive some barriers to entering the program.

The CBPP reports that the growth in the use of disability insurance, on the other hand, is in large part due to demographic factors—an aging population and women’s increased entrance into the workforce—which accounts for half its growth since 1990. The elderly are far more likely to be disabled than younger workers, and more women workers means more workers who might become disabled. Other factors that contributed to its growth include the economic downturn. Joffe-Walt reports on how disability has dovetailed with welfare pruning its rolls. As she shows in two graphs, the number of low-income people on disability rose just as the number of families on welfare declined. Disability receipts also rise as unemployment rises. To qualify for disability, an applicant must have, as CBPP puts it, “little or no income and few assets”—which means that if unemployment and poverty rise, more people will fit this description. As Harold Pollack points out, “If you have a bad back, and the only jobs available are manual labor, that’s a real limitation. You’re unable to work. So it very much matters that we’re in a deep recession and a lot of the opportunities people faced are limited.”

Other than elderly disabled workers, those who sign up for disability are those who can’t even dream of finding a job that doesn’t require physical exertion and have no other income—thus leaving them with no where to turn but disability. After all, unemployment only lasts so long and TANF now comes with strict work requirements. Disability steps in when those with low education levels who live in communities based around industry—hard manual labor—lose their jobs and fall into poverty.

This is what happens when you burn enormous holes in the fabric of the social safety net: people either fall through or cling to the remaining parts. We can certainly debate whether we want food stamps and disability to carry so much of the burden of supporting the poor and vulnerable. In fact, this all seems to point to the simplest answer, which is to just hand money to those in poverty rather than funnel it through these different programs that may or may not actually meet people’s needs. But what we shouldn’t do is assume that food stamps and disability are bloated programs because so many people rely on them and then jump to cutting them back. Poor people don’t disappear just because we slash the programs they rely on. They still struggle to get by. That’s the lesson we should have learned over the past two decades.

 

By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, March 28, 2013

March 30, 2013 Posted by | Poverty | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Fool Me Once”: The Sequester Is Proof That Washington Thinks We Are All Idiots

The tales of sequester woe are starting to mount. Congressmen are complaining about cancelled White House tours, freaking out over potential furloughs of meat inspectors, and fretting over budget cuts in Yellowstone National Park. Republican officeholders are starting to realize that the parochial government services that businesses and consumers in their districts need and care about are getting hit.

And for what? We’ve argued that the primary deficit—the mismatch between the amount of money the government collects each year and the amount of money it spends each year—is melting away. We received further confirmation of this melting trend Wednesday, with the release of the latest Treasury Monthly Statement. It was overlooked, as it dropped just a couple hours before the new pope was announced. But it’s worth examining.

The headline was that February wasn’t a great month for the profit-and-loss sheet of the federal government. It took in $122.8 billion and spent $326 billion, notching a $203.5 billion deficit. That’s pretty grim. But February is always a bad month for receipts. And when you dig into the number, it is possible to see significant improvement.

Compared with February 2012, revenues in February 2013 were up an impressive 18.8 percent. Meanwhile, spending was actually down 2.6 percent from February 2012. So the February 2013 monthly deficit was 12 percent smaller than the February 2012 monthly deficit. This is not an anomaly. For the first five months of fiscal 2013, which started in October, revenues were $1.01 trillion, up 13 percent from the first five months of fiscal 2012, while spending was up just 2.1 percent. The deficit in the first five months of fiscal 2013 is $494 billion, down nearly 15 percent from the first five months of fiscal 2012.

To what do we owe this? Revenue is tied to growth. When the economy grows consistently, more people go to work, more people earn higher wages, and they pay more income and payroll taxes. Companies tend to make more profits, and even though they spend lots of time and effort dodging taxes, they still wind up paying more corporate income taxes. Meanwhile, as we’ve pointed out before, when jobs increase and the economy grows, spending on programs like unemployment benefits fall. That helps narrow the deficit, too. In February, spending on unemployment benefits was off 25 percent from the year before.

There’s another factor at play. And Republicans might want to avert their eyes for this next paragraph. On January 1, the government raised taxes. The payroll tax, which had been cut temporarily to 4.2 percent from 6.2 percent, went back up—a 48 percent increase. And so the 130 million or so Americans with payroll jobs have been paying higher federal taxes for the past two months. Meanwhile, as part of the fiscal cliff deal, higher income taxes were also put in place for high earners. They’re now paying more, too.

A funny thing happens when you raise taxes—you get more tax revenue.

Since the higher tax rates kicked in on January 1, Americans haven’t Gone Galt. They haven’t stopped working in protest of higher taxes and companies haven’t stopped hiring. In fact, they’ve been working more. As a result, revenue has been flooding into Washington. In the two months of the new tax regimen (January and February 2013), receipts are up 17 percent from the comparable period in 2012. Meanwhile, for all the charges of socialism, spending remains muted. A look at the daily Treasury statement suggests the higher revenue trend has continued through the first half of March.

The sequester, universally derided as a stupid way to get deficit reduction, is designed to bring $84 billion in deficit reduction in this fiscal year. Well, in the first five months of fiscal 2013, the deficit is already, wait for it, $85.8 billion smaller than it was in the first five months of fiscal 2012. And that’s all before the sequester takes full effect.

Quiet as it is kept, we are living in a great age of deficit reduction. If we project the numbers from the first five months of this fiscal year into the rest of it, it’s quite likely that the deficit will come in under $900 billion—even without the sequester. That’s high, and it is still a lot of money. But it would represent a deduction of nearly 20 percent from fiscal 2012. And with the economy continuing to grow steadily, the deficit as a percentage of GDP would shrink by an even larger margin.

Washington told itself it needed the sequester in order to make a significant dent in the annual deficit. With each passing month, and with each passing Treasury Monthly Statement, we’re learning that’s not true.

 

By: Daniel Gross, The Daily Beast, March 14, 2013

March 15, 2013 Posted by | Sequester | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Laying Out The Best Options”: The Progressive Case For The Chained Consumer Price Index

Liberals are going to have to decide if they’ll stick with the president if the plan he floated this week to cut Social Security benefits by switching to the so-called chained CPI becomes a reality, and it’s not an easy choice. Progressive pressure groups and lawmakers are furious with Obama for proposing the cuts, as I noted yesterday, but House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she’s confident that her caucus would ultimately support the plan if the president asks them too.

The case against moving to the chained CPI is easy to make: It represents a real cut to seniors’ Social Security benefits, which has so far been a non-starter. Even advocates of the switch acknowledge this. But since we may have to swallow it, it’s worth laying out the best progressive argument possible in favor of the chained CPI. We’re not saying it’s right, but it’s a case that should be made.

And the argument does exist. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, one of the most well-respected liberal think tanks on policy analysis, has endorsed the change. As has the Center for American Progress, Washington’s most powerful liberal think tank, which recommended the chained CPI in its comprehensive Social Security reform plan.

The key question is this: Do you believe Obama can get a deal without cutting anything from social safety entitlement programs, or is he going to have to do something? If you fall in the former camp, then the chained CPI is dead on arrival. But, if you think we’re going to have to cut entitlements at some point, then the chained CPI is probably the least bad option of a menu of bad possibilities, including raising the Medicare retirement age, which is the most likely alternative and would be far more harmful.

On its own, the chained CPI is unquestionably bad, but as part of a deal to raise taxes, extend unemployment benefits and do the other good things Obama wants to do, and if it includes major mitigating tweaks, it can be made almost palatable.

First of all, it’s important to note that the CPI formula doesn’t affect just Social Security. Rather, it appears in hundreds of different places on both the revenue and spending side of government. Almost every government retirement, disability and income-support program pays annual cost of living adjustments that are linked to the CPI. On the tax side, dozens of elements, from the standard deduction to limits on contributions to 401K plans to the earned income and child tax credits, are adjusted every year based on the CPI.

The whole point of the CPI is make sure benefits keep pace with inflation on the one hand, and to ensure that people are paying enough taxes as inflation changes on the other hand. So while the chained CPI cuts benefits, it also raises revenues in a way that’s palatable to Republicans. The change is estimated to save about $220 billion over 10 years, $72 billion of which would come from increased tax revenue.

Moreover, both CBPP and CAP, along with many independent economists, believe the chained CPI is a more accurate measure of inflation than the current index, called the CPI-W. The CPI is calculated by measuring price changes in a basket of 250 common consumer goods, but only the chained CPI takes into account that people shift their buying habits in response to price changes. Adjusting for that, the chained CPI grows about .3 percent slower than the current rate.

Liberals rightly note that this substitution effect isn’t really true for the very poor and very old, who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on non-substitutable goods like healthcare and housing. That’s why the only acceptable way to shift to the chained CPI is to include exemptions for some of the most vulnerable groups.

There are two major changes necessary. First, add a bump in benefits to the very old, who are more likely to have high healthcare bills and to have exhausted their savings that supplemented their Social Security income. Second, exempt Supplemental Security Income, which serves the poorest, disabled and blind but still often leaves people below the poverty line. SSI benefits should actually be increased, but that would require a different effort, so it should at the minimum be exempted from the CPI change.

Obama has indicated that he will demand these changes. The Simpson-Bowles and Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plans, which both included a move to the chained CPI, also included similar caveats. Nancy Pelosi said the changes would be included in a final deal: “The details of this are not all ironed out, but they all mitigate for helping the poorest and neediest in our society, whether they’re Supplemental Security Income recipients, whether they’re 80 and older or whether they’re truly needy in-between.”

With the changes, CBPP says, “we believe that the chained CPI is a reasonable component of a comprehensive package to put the budget on a sustainable course.”

But wait, aren’t there more progressive ways to change Social Security? Yes, but.

Dylan Matthews yesterday laid out three alternative ways to cut the plan that is far progressive in the economic sense and appealing to progressives in the political sense. Two of the plans are different ways to reduce benefits for the wealthy, while the third option would be to raise or eliminate the tax cap, which prevents any income over about $110,000 from being taxed. These plans would all save far more money than the chained CPI, and do it all by hurting only the rich, unlike the CPI change. Great, right?

There are two major political problems with either approach. The first is in the short term: Republicans will never support raising or eliminating the tax cap as it would be a huge tax increase. Even Democrats would have trouble embracing it, since it would mean raising taxes on people who make under $250,000 a year, whose taxes they’ve promised not to hike.

The second problem is in the long term. Social Security was designed to be not a welfare program but a social insurance program. You get out what you paid into it over many years of working, with only marginal changes to redistribute income downward. Making it a welfare program would undermine the programs long-term political strength.

This was a cornerstone of FDR’s vision for the plan. He had to defend the plan from attacks from the populist left, which called for more aggressive redistribution from general taxation. Some means testing may be possible without transforming the perception of the program into a welfare plan, but it’s a potentially dangerous precedent.

Perhaps the best argument against the chained CPI is that even if it is a more accurate measure of inflation, Congress should not cut benefits because it would be almost impossible to restore or raise them (which is probably what actually needs to happen) through a change in the benefit structure. This would require an enormous congressional fight and Republicans would almost surely kill it, so the current CPI should be preserved, the thinking goes. This is convincing. The only plausible response is a good government argument that the CPI should be used to calculate inflation, not monkey with benefits in a backdoor way.

To Paul Krugman, the plan put forward by Obama is barely acceptable, and anything more would be unacceptable, but he’s not convinced the chained CPI is an outright deal killer.

Since the chained CPI may become a reality, liberals should at least begin thinking critically about it, even if just to decide once again that it is unacceptable.

 

By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, December 19, 2012

December 20, 2012 Posted by | Budget | , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“A Solid Template”: President Obama’s Opening Bid To Avert The Fiscal Cliff Is Familiar And Sound

President Obama’s opening bid for negotiations resolving the “fiscal cliff” has surfaced, and the contours are both familiar and sound. The Washington Postand an unofficial outline drafted by Republican aides both suggest that the administration has essentially proposed its budget request for fiscal 2013. And the president’s latest budget offers a solid framework for navigating the fiscal obstacle course, as it would substantially moderate the pace of deficit reduction while making a responsible down payment on longer-term deficit reduction. Relative to current policy, the contours are shaping up roughly as follows:

  • Allow the upper-income Bush tax cuts to expire (+$850 billion)
  • Restore the estate and gift taxes to 2009 parameters (+$120 billion)
  • Curb tax expenditures (+600 billion)
  • Stimulus spending (-$50 billion)
  • Extend emergency unemployment benefits (-$30 billion)
  • Extend or replace the payroll tax cut (-$110 billion)
  • Continue AMT patch, “doc fix,” and tax extenders (-$240 billion)
  • Defer sequestration (?)

Most critically, the Obama framework includes a variation of his American Jobs Act, proposing increased near-term government spending on infrastructure and state fiscal relief while maintaining the ad hoc stimulus set to expire at year’s end—the emergency unemployment compensation (EUC) program, the payroll tax cut, and recent expansion of refundable tax credits—which is the single largest economic headwind threatening recovery among the major components of the scheduled fiscal restraint. (See our à la carte deconstruction of these major components’ budgetary versus economic impacts) The Republican aides’ draft suggests the administration would dedicate $50 billion for infrastructure and stimulus spending, $30 billion for EUC, and $110 billion for an extension of the payroll tax cut or a targeted tax credit, all relative to current policy. And if the administration is looking for a replacement for the payroll tax cut, they could adopt our proposed targeted refundable tax rebate, which would provide a bigger and better economic boost.

Beyond these job creation measures, the president’s proposal for dealing with the economic challenge at hand of overly rapid deficit reduction would largely adhere to current policy—the alternative minimum tax would be indexed for inflation, scheduled Medicare physician reimbursement cuts would be prevented (i.e., the “doc fix” would be continued), expiring business tax provisions would be continued, the sequester would not be implemented in 2013, and the Bush-era tax cuts would be extended for all but upper-income households (those earning more than $250,000 a year). Again, this is all consistent with the president’s budget, with the exception that the budget repealed the sequester instead of deferring it to an unspecified date.

Overall, this proposal would substantially moderate the pace of deficit reduction relative to the current policy, which is critical because this baseline includes sizable fiscal contraction (the payroll tax cut and emergency unemployment benefits are assumed to expire and discretionary spending caps ratchet down). Indeed, the entire challenge posed by the fiscal obstacle course is that budget deficits closing too quickly will push the economy into an austerity-induced recession, and the president’s opening bid actually addresses this very real economic challenge, prioritizing job creation and economic recovery over the (not imminent) problem of longer-term deficit reduction.

But the proposal would make substantial long-run deficit reduction as well. It would allow the upper-income Bush tax cuts to expire, raise roughly another $600 billion from upper-income households and business (presumably by capping the value of tax expenditures), return the estate and gift tax to 2009 parameters, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending by nearly $400 billion (largely without cost-shifting to states or households, with most savings from providers and pharmaceutical companies). Again, these are all proposals from the president’s budget request. As I calculated a few months back, the president’s budget—as scored by the Congressional Budget Office and adjusted for subsequent baseline revisions—would reduce public debt by $3.0 trillion relative to current policy, lowering the debt-to-GDP ratio to a sustainable 73.4 percent. (Add in the nearly $1 trillion from ending the war in Afghanistan, already built into current policy, and you hit the $4 trillion mark that has become the arbitrary but symbolic threshold for fiscal seriousness.)

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that the combination of continuing EUC, continuing the payroll tax cut, increased infrastructure spending, and expiration of the upper-income tax cuts would boost real GDP growth by 1.5 percentage points and increase nonfarm payroll employment by 1.8 million jobs by the end of 2013, relative to current policy. Details on timing of other deficit reduction are lacking, and would likely somewhat reduce the net economic boost, but the proposal nevertheless offers substantial net fiscal support for our depressed economy. My colleague Josh Bivens and I estimated in another recent paper that the president’s 2013 budget would boost employment by about 1.1 million jobs in 2013, largely because of AJA spending and targeted tax cuts (which we delayed one year from the now-ended 2012 fiscal year to allow for feasible implementation).

This framework also closely resembles the proposals in our recent EPI and Century Foundation report Navigating the fiscal obstacle course: Supporting job creation with savings from ending the upper-income Bush-era tax cuts. We proposed diverting half of the savings from ending the upper-income Bush tax cuts and recent estate tax cuts—roughly $600 billion—to job creation measures heavily weighted toward the next three years, which would boost real GDP growth by 1.7 percentage points and increase employment by 2.0 million jobs in 2013. The upper-income Bush tax cuts are the least economically supportive component of the fiscal obstacle course and have a huge opportunity cost; as far as down payments on deficit reduction go, this is the most sound starting point—as the president has proposed in all four budget requests.

The one major departure from the president’s budget is the new and excellent proposal to eliminate the statutory debt ceiling. The statutory debt ceiling has proved an unacceptable economic liability, particularly since Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) irresponsibly pledged in May that he would again hijack the nation’s debt ceiling to be used as a bargaining chip. This duplicative, ill-conceived law should be repealed, or at the very least ruled inoperative.

The president’s budget offered a sound template for moderating the pace of deficit reduction, coupled with a down payment on longer-term deficit reduction that would impose little near-term economic drag—substantially less than the economic boost from the AJA. By adding repeal of the debt ceiling to this balanced package, the president’s opening bid makes for an even more responsible economic and budgetary policy.

 

By: Andrew Fieldhouse, Economic Policy Institute, November 30, 2012

 

 

December 2, 2012 Posted by | Budget | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment