Congress has passed a budget for Fiscal Year 2012. Did you miss it?If you did, that’s understandable, given all the noise coming out of Washington in recent weeks about extending the Social Security payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed.But Congress actually did pass an FY2012 budget, albeit two and a half months after the fiscal year began on October 1st. It did so by passing an “omnibus” spending package that bundled together nine of the usual 12 annual appropriations bills into a single piece of legislation.In a normal year Congress passes and ...

This is the latest entry in NPP’s weekly Data Wednesday series, intended to introduce new users to our Federal Priorities Database.  All posts are archived here.

In last week’s Data Wednesday post, we showed you how to time travel on the Federal Priorities Database map. This week, we’ll discuss something important to keep in mind when comparing numbers between years: inflation.

Inflation is the change in purchasing power over time. For example, a dollar in 1993 bought more than a dollar would buy today. So when looking at a money-related dataset, you can’t compare a 1993 ...

Executive director Jo Comerford explains how budget reductions affect the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

This week’s headlines from Washington have focused on an end of year budget deal that would avoid a federal government shutdown and the expiration of a temporary reduction in workers’ Social Security payroll deductions. Two important issues, to be sure, but left somewhere in the dust is another and arguably more important issue – the expiration of unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed workers.Last December, as part of a deal to extend the Bush era tax credits, the Obama Administration and Congress agreed to temporarily reduce employee Social Security contributions from 6.2 percent of their wages to 4.2 ...

This is the third installment of our weekly posts about NPP’s Federal Priorities Database.  If you missed installments one and two, we've archived everything here.

Last week, we took a look at the map that displays database search results. This week, I want to point out an important feature that works with the map: the year slider:

The Federal Priorities Database keeps historical information so you can track trends. The map, however, can only show one year of data at a time, and that’s where the slider—the horizontal bar immediately underneath the map—comes in:

After ...

Senior research analyst Mattea Kramer explains how the proposed extension of unemployment benefits would help keep the economy afloat.

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 ...

In Monday’s budget brief, NPP’s senior research analyst Chris Hellman explained the payroll tax cut and President Obama's proposal to extend it. But the proposal is controversial—it's been criticized by both Democrats and Republicans. Republicans argue that President Obama must find a way to offset the tax cut by cutting expenditures elsewhere (the President has proposed paying for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, something that Republicans oppose).

Democrats have also expressed disapproval of the payroll tax cut extension, but for a different reason. The payroll tax is a special kind of tax ...

This is the second installment of our weekly posts about the Federal Priorities Database.  Last week, we ran a database search, creating a map of results.

The next step is interpreting the map. Here’s an example I created by running a search on Unemployment Insurance expenditures.

The three most important things to look at on the map are the title, the measures, and the legend:

The map’s title describes the dataset you’re looking at and also shows the year currently on display.

Some data can be viewed in different ways—for example, in per person amounts, as ...

In the latest installment of our weekly Budget Brief videos, senior research analyst Chris Hellman explains the payroll tax cuts enacted last year, the proposed extension of these cuts into 2012, and the debate over how to pay for them.

Visit the National Priorities Project YouTube channel to see our past Budget Briefs.

I stayed up half the night engrossed in this book.

It’s that compelling and well designed.  In fact, I’ve been an organizer and activist for 45 years, and I’ve never seen a resource as useful, timely and visually appealing as the just-released Dream of a Nation: Inspiring Ideas for a Better America.  We are proud to be one of over 60 collaborators contributing to this 400 page book of essays, over three years in the making  What’s so unique about this is book is that it covers so much ground, so thoroughly.  It’s an encyclopedia ...

We're introducing a new weekly data feature to showcase our Federal Priorities Database and help folks make the best use of it. Not sure what the database is? It's a collection of information we've pulled from many, many federal government agencies and compiled into one easy-to-use search tool. We think it’s important for people to see how the US spends money and how that money impacts our quality of life.

We’ll start at the beginning and describe how to run a database search in three easy steps.

Step 1: Where do you go?

To get ...