Negotiators say they have a deal on a $150 billion bill to extend the payroll tax cut, some unemployment insurance benefits and the “doc fix” to the end of the year, a bill that will sacrifice some health care prevention money, several weeks of unemployment eligibility, and at the very end, pension contributions for new [...]

There is less optimism now over the prospects of a deal wrapping up on the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and a doctor’s fix on Medicare reimbursement rates than there was this morning. Leading House Democrats exhibited caution over declaring a deal done. “We’re still a long ways from getting there,” said Rep. Xavier Becerra [...]

In an impressive bit of caving, the House Republican leadership has given up on finding offsets for the payroll tax cut, proposing a bill that would extend the current cut to the end of the year without any funding. However, the other two pieces that were tied to the overall legislation at the end of [...]

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than [...]

The White House has told Congressional Republicans they only have one avenue to avoid the defense trigger that would cut the military budget by around $600 billion over the next ten years: they would have to increase revenue by a similar amount. In light of Congressional Republicans’ abandonment of a key part of the debt [...]

The Congressional Budget Office released their latest budget and economic outlook for 2012. CBO outlooks are frequently wrong, so we shouldn’t read a whole lot into this. But there are a few nuggets worth pulling out. First, there really is no pressing deficit problem. While the FY 2012 deficit should clock in, according to CBO, [...]

Chart compiled by Paul Krugman showing decline in public investment by state and local governments since the 2008-2009 recession. Austerity is a major issue abroad, particularly Europe, but it has more to do with the sclerotic economic pace in the US than most people realize. Republicans successfully got spending caps that will ratchet down the [...]

The gross domestic product increased by 2.8% in the last quarter of 2011 boosted by sales of cars but hampered by austerity in government purchases over the final three months. The full year growth was only 1.7%, which as a release from the Economic Policy Institute says,”would not generate reliable declines in unemployment should it [...]

First-time unemployment claims dropped sharply last week to 352,000, a drop of 50,000 from the previous week (the biggest one-week drop since September 2005). It’s important to point out that the moving four-week average, which is a lot less noisy, only dropped 3,000, to around a 379,000 weekly average. But that’s a lot better than [...]

I’ve seen a spate of stories recently suggesting that a economic recovery is fated to happen by 2013, and whoever wins the Presidential election will be able to claim the mantle of the “recovery President.” This is far too deterministic a take for me. There is such a thing as a business cycle, but to [...]

The President has a speech at this hour where he will call for the consolidation of several federal agencies to shrink the federal bureaucracy and save money, a return to the “age of austerity” Obama that has faded of late as the election nears and populism returns to the fore. Obama will propose combining the [...]