Budget

Yesterday morning, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) bolted the Biden Group deficit talks in frustration over repeated insistence by Democrats that some revenue raisers be included in the deal to raise the debt limit.  There were conflicting accounts over whether Cantor's move was made on his own, but it did appear to catch Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) by surprise.  A few hours later Kyl announced he would boycott the talks as well. 

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) rushed to the White House Wednesday night for a hastily arranged meeting with President Obama, presumably to reassure him that a deal would eventually be reached. 

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will address the Economic Club of New York over dinner next Monday.  His remarks come at a crucial time as world money managers assess whether the U.S. will get its fiscal house in order.  Here's what I expect to hear.

Visitors to House and Senate Budget Committee mark-ups are often surprised by how debates over baselines consume more time than debates over policy.  That's because agreeing to a baseline forces certain policy decisions.  If you assume tax cuts will be extended in the baseline, it doesn't cost anything to extend them.  If you assume the President's spending proposals in the baseline, you can show large spending cuts when you remove them, even if they had little chance of enactment anyway.  That's the game being played now.  This morning, the Congressional Budget Office will release its baseline as required by the Budget Act in its annual Analysis of the President's Budget.  CBO is constrained to take into account "present law," except that any expiring trust fund taxes are assumed to continue.  That means that last December's tax cuts will be assumed to expire at the end of 2012, even though most, if not all, of them will be extended at a 10-year cost of $3.2 tr.  President Obama wants to allow the tax cu

No! We're not there yet. We're not even sure where there is yet.  The NFL talks are going better.

So far, for the whopping price of $4.1 billion of easy pickings, $2.7 billion of Administration proposals that had no chance of enactment anyway plus $1.7 billion of earmarks, we funded two more weeks of FY11.  Wait a minute.  That's last year's budget.

Right.  We still don't have a budget for FY11, which we are more than five months into.  No budget resolution passed Congress last year, and no regular appropriations did either.  The only FY11 appropriations have been continuing resolutions and a supplemental.