Budget Matters Blog

You’ve heard the term “fiscal cliff” and you’ve definitely heard that lawmakers in Washington can’t agree on spending or taxes. But here’s what you may not have heard: The federal budget negotiations happening right now may result in deep cuts to programs that benefit the next generation of Americans — the young people who are this country’s future.

Kamau Akabueze/ flickr

With collaborators at the great organization Young Invincibles, our team at National Priorities Project recently published a groundbreaking report called A Fight for the Future: Education, Job Training, and the Fiscal Showdown. Here are the ...

Today we released the findings of a major investigation. We collaborated with our friends at Young Invincibles to explore the federal budget through the eyes of this nation's young people. Here's a snippet:During the twentieth century, the United States raised living standards by creating the best-educated workforce in the world. The nation’s success rested on local, state and federal investment in high quality, universal primary and secondary schooling, coupled with affordable higher education. But public investment is now on the decline. Over the last decade, funding for education fell as a share of total public spending ...

Once again, NPP contributed facts about the budget, taxes, and federal spending to the Presidential Debate conversation happening on Twitter.

[<a href="http://storify.com/natpriorities/npp-tweets-presidential-debate-2-3" target="_blank">View the story "NPP Tweets Presidential Debate #2" on Storify</a>]

These days, it’s fashionable for any candidate for federal office to talk about how quickly he’ll reduce the budget deficit, which totaled around $1.1 trillion in fiscal 2012.  And you’re going to hear talk about the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan and more like it in the coming debates.  But immediate deep deficit reduction will reverse the economic recovery, and that fact is left out of election rhetoric.  Think of it this way: If you woke up tomorrow and learned that Washington had solved the deficit crisis and you’d lost your job, would you celebrate? Of ...

William from Denver, Colorado, asks: “Is there a way to show whether or not the private sector is actually ‘doing fine?’ In TV commercials I see that Mitt Romney is criticizing President Obama for saying that.”

Great minds can disagree about what constitutes “fine,” so let’s look at a firm measure of private sector health – the most recent jobs report. It didn’t contain a lot of good news, though there was perhaps one bright spot.

In May, the overall U.S. economy added 69,000 jobs. That was much lower than expected, and most analysts considered it an ...

To accompany this week’s look at employment numbers, we’ve updated last year’s unemployment and underemployment story from NPP’s Federal Priorities Database.

The chart below compares unemployment rates to underemployment rates. Underemployment is a number that not only counts the unemployed but also counts people no longer looking for work and part time employees who would rather be working full time. What’s interesting is that until the economic downturn, underemployment was about four percentage points higher than unemployment.

Since 2008, however, the gap between these numbers has increased, remaining at about seven percentage points at the ...

This week, in honor of high school and college graduations, we’re talking about job creation and employment. There’s much disagreement over the federal government and job creation—that is, if the federal government can, or should, create jobs.

Here’s a simple way of looking at it: The federal government is certainly capable of creating jobs. It can hire construction workers to repair bridges and highways; it can send cash to the states to hire more teachers and police officers; and it can create jobs through more subtle measures, like providing tax cuts to corporations that may use ...

Senior research analyst Mattea Kramer looks through the President's budget proposal to find out what is designated for job creation.

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Likely voters said their top priority for President Obama’s 2013 budget was job creation, according to a poll conducted last month by The Hill. The president released his fiscal 2013 budget on Feb. 13, and it includes around $350 billion for job creation, including money for jobs in the short-term, in part through investment in transportation projects that generate construction work and other kinds of immediate employment. The new budget also included a proposal for long-term job creation.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama said business leaders aren’t finding the skills they need ...

Our latest data story focuses on the differences between unemployment and underemployment and how a long-term economic downturn affects their relationship.

Although unemployment is the number most people use when evaluating the state of the U.S. labor force, it’s also interesting to consider underemployment, a statistic that includes people who are no longer looking for work and part-time workers who would rather have full-time jobs. Between 2003 and 2007, underemployment was, on average, close to four percentage points above the unemployment rate. Beginning in 2008, the gap between these numbers began to increase and rose to seven percentage ...