Both Congress and the Obama Administration have stepped up enforcement of immigration laws–at immense cost to both the budget and the courts.

Continuing a trend that stretches back nearly two years, the monthly federal budget deficit hit another record in April: The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the federal deficit for April soared to $82.7 billion, the largest imbalance for that month on record. That was significantly higher than last year’s April deficit of $20 billion and [...]

My colleague Dave Schuler has an excellent post on the hard choices involved in making the federal budget sustainable. He also offers the following cuts: I may as well express my preferences for cutting the deficit as well: reduce healthcare spending (along the lines suggested above), cut military spending by reducing our military commitments in [...]

The L.A. Times has a fascinating article about the difficulties in accounting for estimated costs in a troop surge in Afghanistan. The calculations so far have produced a sweeping range. The Pentagon publicly estimates it will cost $500,000 a year for every additional service member sent to the war zone. Obama’s budget experts size it [...]

In a front piece story in today’s NYT, Edmund Andrews warns that the bill is about to come due on the massive borrowing the federal government has engaged in. Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and [...]

Last week, Congress approved the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, with costs totalling to a whopping $680 billion. And as Christopher Preble points out, that’s not all: The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the [...]

President Obama is set to address the nation’s schoolchildren next week, presumably to propagandize them into his evil agenda of turning the country into Communist Russia (pronounced “roo-shuh”) and offing granny to save money on health care just as they do in his native Kenya. There are even instruction manuals to enlist the support of [...]

David Frum frets that conservatives might be in for a Pyrrhic victory in the health care fight if they define winning as “beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself.” [W]e’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) [...]

Bill Maher has a piece at HuffPo arguing that Americans are a bunch of idiots who should just shut up and let people who know what they’re talking about make decisions on tough issues like health care reform. [T]ake the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can [...]

Radley Balko has a new column at Fox on “Washington’s Wealth Boom.” The new top three [wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income] are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were [...]

A new Rasmussen poll finds that voters trust John McCain more than Barack Obama on taxes (47%to 45%) and on “economic issues” more generally (48% to 47%).  These numbers are, of course, within the margin of error.  They do, however, represent a reversal of a trend and may indicate that the “Joe the Plumber” and [...]

I wrote a quick post before bed last night giving my off-the-cuff reaction to Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, arguing that, despite all the talk of “change,” it was basically a speech that Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry could have given. The NYT has a six-page transcript [...]

This just in: Politicians promise lots of things they won’t be able to deliver if they get elected. Yesterday, we had the hilarity of John McCain’s promise to balance the budget in four years without raising taxes or cutting anything but “wasteful” spending. Today, we’ve got an analysis from the Los Angeles Times showing that [...]

John McCain is promising to balance the budget in his first term: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico. [...] “In the long-term, the [...]

The latest report issued by the Medicare Trustees is not good. The HI annual cost rate is projected to increase from 3.11 percent of taxable payroll in 2007 to 11.40 percent in 2082—8.02 percent of taxable payroll more than the projected income rate for 2082. Expressed in relation to the projected Gross Domestic Product (GDP), [...]

Jason Campbell, Michael O’Hanlon and Amy Unikewicz say that Brookings has come up with some metrics to measure political progress in Iraq and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there actually has been some. The most intriguing area of late is the sphere of politics. To track progress, we have established “Brookings benchmarks” — a set [...]

Mark Tapscott provides an extensive report of a Congressional Research Service finding that President Bush could, by mere executive order, stop all earmark spending directed by committee report rather than actual legislation. It turns out that this is the vast majority of all pork barrel spending. Of course, no evidence whatsoever has been provided in [...]

Kevin Drum, taking as a given that most of us are perfectly satisfied with our current health coverage but scared of losing it, offers an interesting solution: [E]xpand Medicare (or create a similar program) to cover every person in America under the age of 21. And then let them keep it as they grow older. [...]

Former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn is thinking about a White House bid, the AJC’s Jim Galloway reports. Sam Nunn left the U.S. Senate more than 10 years ago. Since then, the Georgia Democrat, who made his name nationally as a defense-minded hawk, has watched what’s happened to the country, and he’s more than a bit [...]

Jagadeesh Gokhale argues in this Cato Policy Analysis that Medicaid is on an unsustainable growth path. Current trends and policies imply unsustainable growth in federal Medicaid outlays. In the year 2006, federal Medicaid spending was 11.9 percent of federal general revenues and 1.5 percent of GDP. Making conservative assumptions about future growth in Medicaid enrollment [...]

Today’s Washington Examiner editorial argues that the convictions of Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham and the criminal indictment of William Jefferson may well be just the tip of an iceberg of corruption in Congress. While federal prosecutors don’t claim Jefferson used earmarks in his solicitations, let it be noted that the same disdain for the [...]

The U.S. Defense Budget is, to put it mildly, rather large. The FY 2008 budget authority for defense is a staggering $508 billion, with expected outlays of $516.5. As has been pointed out numerous times here and elsewhere, we’re quite literally spending more on defense than all other countries on the face of the earth [...]

Mark Tapscott reports that Congress refuses to identify by name the Members that put earmarks into the federal budget and that the Bush administration, through the institution of the Office of Management and Budget, has no plans to do anything about this. No, I’m not surprised, either. UPDATE: Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation notes [...]

Governor Mitt Romney came by Bloggers Row after his CPAC speech and I got the chance to shake his hand and ask him a few questions. His pitch, like that of most candidates, is very high level and platitudinous: Cut government spending, change the culture of Washington, increase efficiency, reach across the aisle, and so [...]

The Spam King and I Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

hilzoy, reflecting on a pay-per-view Paul Krugman column arguing that, for political reasons, “Given a choice between cutting the deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, Democrats in Congress should choose the spending,” observes, [I]t has not escaped my notice that Democrats’ hard work at cutting the deficit, and our willingness [...]

Jonathan Chait has a belated but quite amusing critique of the recent “Liberaltarian” boomlet about a supposed natural libertarian-liberal axis. Two key passages get at the heart of it: But, as Newt Gingrich learned to his dismay, support for smaller government as an abstract proposition almost never translates into opposition to government as it actually [...]

Ben Stein, he of “Ferris Bueller” and “Win Ben Stein’s Money” fame, had a meeting with mega-billionaire Warren Buffett and came away thinking that we should tax rich people more. Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the [...]

Erick Erricson breaks news that Mike Pence and John Shadegg are going to run for Minority Leader and Minority Whip. Great news, indeed. Both are reasonably conservative–and fiscal conservatives, at that–and untainted with the stench of the scandals that helped transform the current Majority into the incoming Minority. Rob Bluey has details: As the conservative [...]

The Congressional Budget Office’s Monthly Budget Review for October had some good news. CBO estimates that the federal budget deficit was about $250 billion in fiscal year 2006, around $68 billion less than the shortfall recorded in 2005. Relative to the size of the economy, that deficit was equal to 1.9 percent of the gross [...]

Mark Tapscott’s Examiner editorial on a “mystery Senator” who has put an anonymous hold on the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act observes, [F]ederal spending transparency is anathema for too many Democrats and Republicans in government. They think members of the public ought to keep their noses out of how their tax dollars are being [...]

Some more interesting research from NBER, this time on the impact of Medicare on the health care industry. I’ve argued in the past that one of the effects of Medicare would have been to push up the price of health care not only for the elderly, but for everybody. This follows form the well known [...]

It’s all but official. Conservative pundit Tony Snow will be named White House press secretary, Republican officials said Tuesday night, in the latest move in President Bush’s effort to remake his troubled White House. [...] Snow, a Fox News commentator and speech-writer in the White House under Bush’s father, has written and spoken frequently about [...]

The State Department improperly approved premium class travel for its employees, according to a GAO report. Two-thirds of the $140 million spent by State Department officials for premium-class travel tickets over a year and a half was not properly authorized or justified, according to a new report from auditors. Senior agency executives improperly approved blanket [...]

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has started a new blog called “Beat the Press,” solely devoted to bad reporting on budgetary numbers. His premise: [T]he public is hugely misinformed about the federal budget. Most people hugely overestimate the share of spending that goes to areas like TANF (the main [...]

Duncan Black and Kevin Drum call B.S. on Andrew Sullivan‘s statement that, “I’m in favor of Bush’s tax cuts, but want spending cuts to match them; I favor balanced budgets . . . .” Black writes that, “It’s a nice little fantasy to fetishize ‘small government’ and imagine that liberals fetishize ‘big government’ but that [...]

No, not body snatcher imposter, but an imposter in terms of being a conservative. I have been feeling this way about Bush for quite some time now. Bush’s first reaction to any problem is to turn toward government. Government is what has brought about the new jobs he has been bragging about (and frankly it [...]

John Boehner, the number two vote getter on the first ballot and everyone’s consensus second choice, has defeated Majority Whip Roy Blunt and been elected House Majority Leader, according to GOP.gov and Mike Krempasky at RedState. Update: AP confirms: “Rep. Boehner Elected House Majority Leader” Rep. John Boehner of Ohio was elected House majority leader [...]

Leadership Shake-Up Spurred Policy Shift (WaPo) The WashingtonPost has a front page article on how the (temporary?) ouster from House Majority Leader Tom “there is no pork in the budget” DeLay has become an opportunity for the Republican Study Committee (RSC) to call for fiscal restraint and offsets to pay for Hurricane Katrina. House Republican [...]