Posts Tagged ‘U.S. debt’

Bush tax cuts vs. Obama health care

March 4, 2010Jon Brooks 3 Comments »

From a recent post titled “What Are These Three Numbers” on the economics blog Econbrowser comes this chart:

bushtaxcutsobamahealth

“The first bar is the impact on the unified budget balance of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA) of 2001. (Ed. note: That’s the first Bush tax cut.) The second is the impact on the budget balance of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) of 2003 (the second Bush tax cut). The third bar is the CBO estimated impact on the deficit of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act proposed in the Senate on November 19, for 2010-2019.”

These numbers, represented in billions of 2010 dollars, were taken from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

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Who’s to blame for deficits? Bush, Obama, or both?

February 17, 2010Jon Brooks No Comments »

Speaking of the U.S. debt, as we did in our last post — Keith Hennessy, who was a senior White House economic advisor to President George W. Bush, wrote a lengthy post on his blog a couple of weeks ago criticizing President Obama’s description of the Bush years as a “decade of profligacy.” One argument, [...]

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U.S. debt: Worse than you think

February 17, 2010Jon Brooks 1 Comment »

“Recent trends in credit default swap markets show a clearly discernable uptick in the perceived likelihood of default on 5-year U.S. senior Treasury debt, a notion that was virtually unthinkable in the past.” Cited in today’s front page New York Times article on the inability of government to address the mounting national debt is research [...]

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