With the House of Representatives voting for passage, there is finally a single, concrete piece of legislation that is the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) – at least until the Senate gets in on the act. And with the publication of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimate or "score," there is a lot more clarity about some key ...

With the House of Representatives voting for passage, there is finally a single, concrete piece of legislation that is the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) – at least until the Senate gets in on the act. And with the publication of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimate or "score," there is a lot more clarity about some key ...

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has spent more than $5 trillion to combat it and to support American families and businesses. But now, with the economy in recovery, the risks of significant additional federal spending are becoming too obvious to ignore. American families ultimately will pay the price if ...

Friday's Labor Department employment report for April was a shocker. Instead of the anticipated million-plus new jobs and continued declines in the unemployment rate, the economy created only 266,000 jobs and the unemployment report crept upward by 0.1 percent. What happened? Supply problems, not demand, drove the disappointing report ...

Immigration reform offers the opportunity to heal partisan divisions and bolster the prospects for growth and prosperity. Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham have reintroduced the Dream Act, a bill that has crossed desks in Congress for 20 years and would provide a path for immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children. ...

The pandemic has tested US broadband and light-touch regulatory policies. Both are being vindicated amid unprecedented demand for internet streaming. Two years ago, the Federal Communications Commission repealed “network neutrality.” Many forecast disaster as a result, predicting the rise of miserly internet providers and throttled access. But ...

With partisan divisions as deep as ever, both sides can agree on one thing: Everybody wants to avoid another financial crisis. And forecasters have recently identified subprime auto loans as an existential threat to the economy. The headlines are eye-catching and scary: "A $45,000 Loan for a $27,000 Ride: More Borrowers Are Going Underwater ...

Trade-offs include destruction of existing coverage, regardless of personal preferences. A majority of House Democrats are co-sponsoring legislation (H.R.1384) to outlaw virtually all Americans’ public and private health insurance and replace their coverage with a new government plan. In the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” ...

President Obama's announcement that "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone" is often taken as the beginning of governing by executive action. In fact, during its roughly 2,500 days of existence, the Obama administration has finalized an average of 1.03 new regulations every day, at a cost of $282 million in private-sector compliance burdens ...

Editor's note: How to finance care for individuals with pre-existing medical conditions has long been one of the thorniest, most challenging issues in health care policy. The Affordable Care Act's solution was a vast, complex clockwork of individual and employer coverage mandates, guaranteed issue, modified community rating, multiple ...

We examine the employment effects and antipoverty implications of raising the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour and to $15 per hour, respectively, by 2020. We focus on how raising the federal minimum wage would affect the very low-wage workers whom the policy is intended to help. Overall, we find significant trade-offs in raising the ...

A labor dispute on the West Coast is already slowing commerce, but a work stoppage would be disastrous. Once again, ports on the West Coast are being held hostage by union longshoremen, with potential to harm average Americans, the U.S. economy and U.S. military personnel overseas who may not receive needed supplies in time. After decades of ...

What should the government do vs. not do? Where to draw the line is the source of vigorous debate and elections serve to resolve those differences in opinion. However, most Americans, irrespective of their political stripe, accord the federal government the essential duty of protecting its citizens. And, regardless of the disagreement about how ...

Political heat has intensified on tax “inversions” after a wave of cross-border mergers and acquisitions – Medtronic/Covidien, AbbVie/Shire, Mylan/Abbott Labs, and others. A tax inversion occurs when a U.S.-headquartered firm acquires or merges with a smaller global firm, but the headquarters are located in the acquired firm’s country because ...

Lower rates and fewer special preferences would yield an annual bonus of 500,000 jobs. Tax reform done right can boost economic growth, spur job creation, and reduce the deficit. House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) took a big step toward this vital goal last week by releasing a comprehensive plan to modernize the income-tax ...

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” is a promise that rings in political infamy. The magnitude of the deception has only begun to become apparent.

Certainly, the administration thought it was in hot water over millions of canceled individual-market policies in 2013. It better brace itself, though, for the wrath of seniors who will suffer the fallout of the budgetary attack on Medicare Advantage plans. ...

The administration added an umpteenth delay to the scheduled implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The original timelines of the ACA had the law’s major insurance-market reforms fully phased in by January 1, 2014. Instead, individuals, families, and businesses trying to make sense of the law have had to follow delay after delay ...

Introduction

Medicare Part D was created by the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) to provide affordable prescription drug insurance coverage with a variety of benefit levels and premium costs. Over the past ten years, Part D hasdeveloped a track ...

"And that is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America's basic bargain -- that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. I believe this is the defining challenge of our time: Making sure our economy works for every working American." (President Obama, December 4, ...

Every once in a while a policy idea is sufficiently without merit that Republicans and Democrats in Congress unite in opposition. The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) medical device tax is one such policy lemon. Not only is the 2.3 percent tax on sales of medical devices terrible tax policy, it will hurt innovation and small businesses the ...

The House–Senate committee should reach a deal, and they can find a good one. While losing the daily news competition to the ongoing self-implosion of Obamacare, the House–Senate budget conference grinds toward its December 13 deadline. Spawned by the deal to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government, the conference is tasked with building ...

The confirmation hearing of Federal Reserve Chairwoman nominee Janet Yellen on Thursday will be an opportune moment for Fed critics to air their grievances. There is plenty of fodder for disagreement and debate — ranging from the Fed’s supervisory track record, to the rules for tapering large-scale asset purchases, to the criteria for ending ...

Excessive regulation is not the answer, nor is a heavy-handed retribution from Washington for failed investments. Is our financial system safer today? Don't big banks keep growing and their risky bets still endanger the system?

Not so fast. Let's get three facts right: ...

Less than a week before Obamacare is to go live, the administration finally showed its hand — sort of — on the premiums in the 36 federally run exchanges — places where insurance exchanges are run in whole or part by the federal government. Even a cursory glance at the numbers reveals several ...

How conservatives painted themselves into a corner. The public budget debate has been hijacked by a vociferous minority of activist conservatives aligned with a number of outside activist groups led by the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz and former Sen. Jim DeMint.

Using a variety of political threats and purity tests, they have been demanding a vote on a bill to fund the government that includes “defunding Obamacare.” Now that the House has passed the funding bill, they are getting their chance to prove that their strategy will work. ...

The bombshell that dropped last night is not 4th of July fireworks — it was the White House announcing that it was delaying enforcement of the employer-mandate in Obamacare until 2015. For a public inured to raven political decisions trumping policy, even this was ...

Obamacare was paid for on the backs of students. You may remember that Obamacare staggered over the legislative finish line in 2010 with $19 billion in profits from changes to the student loan program. The changes included nationalizing federal student lending and setting loan interest rates high enough to generate profits to cover the ...

Obamacare was paid for on the backs of students.

You may remember that Obamacare staggered over the legislative finish line in 2010 with $19 billion in profits from changes to the student loan program. The changes included nationalizing federal student lending and setting loan interest rates high enough to generate ...

The young drop coverage to avoid higher premiums. The political travails of the Affordable Care Act — aka Obamacare — continue, as witnessed by the furor surrounding Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius‘ attempts to solicit funds to pay for its implementation. Politics do garner the bulk of the media attention, and the public ...

The immigration reform debate has begun. With the release of a framework for Senate legislation, voices are being heard on national security (especially on the southern border), legal issues (protection for employers who attempt to follow hiring laws), the future of the undocumented in the United States, and sector concerns (high-tech ...

Over nearly a century, progressives have pressed for a national, single-payer healthcare system. When it comes to health reform, what have conservatives stood for?

For far too long, conservatives have failed to coalesce around a long-term vision of what a free-market healthcare system should look like. Republican attention to healthcare, in turn, has only arisen sporadically, in response to Democratic initiatives. ...

The fiscal cliff is a danger to the economy. Some have argued that cliff diving is benign either because the cliff itself is an illusion – it is really a gentle slope – or because policymakers have the cartoon-like power to reverse going over the cliff without hitting ...