Legislation that has cleared a key House committee to cut federal jobs could have a substantially smaller impact than has been touted by both its sponsors and its critics, according to a congressional analysis. The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday released a cost estimate of a bill that last month passed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee seeking to reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent mainly through attrition. The idea has been raised numerous times this year in spending reduction plans. Most recently, a bill offered Wednesday in the House proposed such job cuts as a way to avoid the reductions in spending in 2013 and later that are required because the congressional “supercommittee” failed to produce deficit-cutting recommendations. Read full article > >

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Job cut plan could have less impact than advertised, CBO finds

There has been a strong and troubling shift in market rewards for a small minority relative to the rewards available to most citizens. A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that incomes of the top 1 percent of the U.S. population (adjusted for inflation) rose 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, while income for the middle class grew only 40 percent. Even this dismal figure overstates the fortunes of typical Americans. In 1965, only one in 20 men ages 25 to 54 was not working; by the end of this decade, it is likely to be one in six, even if a full cyclical recovery is achieved. Read full article > >

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Three ways to combat rising inequality

As Occupy Wall Street and related protests inject themselves into the 2012 presidential campaigns, a new government report shows that over the past three decades the incomes of the nation’s top earners have grown far more rapidly than those of everyone else. The nation’s economic gains have been increasingly concentrated in the households of the top 1 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, echoing previous studies cited by Occupy Wall Street protesters . Read full article > >

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CBO: Incomes of top earners grow at a pace far faster than everyone else’s

So much for fiscal discipline. The deal that Congress reached in April for the 2011 budget was said to cut $38 billion from 2010 spending. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said at the time that the number was an exaggeration: the real cut…

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Budget ‘Cut’ Deal Upped Spending

In its annual re-calculation of the president’s budget, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that President Obama’s policies would require deficits of $9.5 trillion through 2021 — more than $2 trillion higher than White House estimates.

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CBO: Obama policies would require deficits of $9.5 trillion through 2021

No wonder President Obama didn’t mention this in his State of the Union address: A new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office places the U.S.’s soaring budget deficit at $1.5 trillion in 2011-meaning that the government is borrowing 40 cents for…

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Budget Deficit Nears $1.5 Trillion

The Congressional Budget Office reports that the budget deficit continues to balloon.

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The Caucus: Deficit at $1.5 Trillion, Postwar Record

ABC News reports that the Congressional Budget Office this week released its latest report on the effects of the Recovery Act and found that it “raised the GDP, lowered unemployment, and increased the number of people with jobs.” According to the report, CBO estimates that the Recovery Act’s policies in the third quarter of the calendar year 2010 had the following effects (emphasis added): read more

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CBO: Recovery Act Raised GDP and Lowered Unemployment but Effects Are ‘Expected to Wane’