The Ryan budget has appeared as a chairman’s mark. It’s a long document written in Congress-ese, but I’ve already gone over some of the main points. Here are a couple other tidbits: • The coverage of the trigger cuts for 2013, incorporated into this document, are unformed and will be the work of six committees. [...]

Next week, Paul Ryan will introduce the Republican budget, which we already know will set a discretionary spending level roughly $20 billion below the spending cap negotiated in the debt limit deal. We also know that it will include the premium support program for Medicare that would end the guaranteed system in favor of a [...]

We’ve already seen that House Republicans may set the FY2013 budget well below the spending cap laid out in the debt limit deal, risking acrimony and a possible government shutdown right before the 2012 election. The budget resolution should get unveiled next week. But David Rogers adds a new wrinkle to the debate. The House, [...]

It’s looking more and more like House Republicans will seek to renege on the Budget Control Act, the deal on the debt limit from last August, and deliver a budget below the spending cap set out in that legislation. The spending cap was a ceiling and not necessarily a floor, so House GOP leaders can [...]

Here we go again. Intransigence from Republicans basically kept us out of a grand bargain last year. Plenty of Democrats were willing to do it, the White House was more than willing to do it, and even John Boehner was willing to do it, at least on a conceptual level. But House Republicans wouldn’t betray [...]

In the aftermath of a horribly bruising debt limit deal and the Occupy movement, the focus in Washington shifted away from deficits and back to the economy, jobs and income inequality. But as a reminder that social movements must be constant and vigilant, one powerful Democrat, in association with a DC lobbying group, wants to [...]

Did you know that the federal government expects to spend $450 billion on fighting wars over the next decade? This, despite the removal of all troops fron Iraq, and the transition of combat missions over to the Afghans by 2014, if not a year earlier? That’s what we can take from the numbers in the [...]

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to go before Congress today and defend the $614 billion proposed budget for the military in the coming fiscal year. Not because that’s a staggering amount, especially with spending caps all over the government. Because it’s too small for [...]

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 [...]

Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of [...]

The President made some brief remarks at the Pentagon during the introduction of the new “austerity” defense budget. He stressed that the US will still have the most powerful fighting force in the world, that even after the cuts the defense budget would grow over the next five years, and that the overall budget will [...]