This month the first voters head to the polls to decide who will be the Republican nominee for president. National Priorities Project took a look at the extent to which residents of the first primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, receive federal support—even if they may be unaware of it. ...

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 ...

 Last week I wrote about how automatic, across-the-board cuts scheduled to take effect in 2013 may never take place—because a new Congress can choose not to uphold budget cuts legislated by our current Congress.  But it’s also worth asking, if the next Congress does uphold these automatic cuts, called “sequestration,” ...

We’re happy to announce that our expenditure datasets now include per capita numbers. In other words, you can see the amount of money spent for each person who lives in a state or county. Why is this important? Below is a map of federal food stamp spending in FY 2010. ...

November 23rd is the deadline for the super committee, officially named the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. They’ve all but announced failure to come up with even $1 of their $1.2 trillion deficit reduction task. Since the creation of the super committee, we’ve been hearing there would be automatic, ...

This week the Economic Policy Institute celebrates its 25th anniversary. We at National Priorities Project want to thank EPI for a quarter century of service, and for things like this chart, from the recent EPI report on income inequality: This chart is a unique- and telling- way of examining the ...

There’s so much talk these days about federal deficits and cutting spending. So we at NPP thought it would be good to talk about tax revenues—the other half of the budget picture—and not just about spending (For some background on how the budget works, check out the People’s Guide to ...

$1,034,401,772,556. That’s the cost to the U.S. Treasury since 2001 from Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans—as of the moment I started writing this blog post. National Priorities Project and Citizens for Tax Justice today released CostOfTaxCuts.com, a site that has a real-time ticker showing the ...

This week I (Mattea Kramer, research analyst here at NPP) traveled to Washington to the Take Back the American Dream conference. What did I learn? I learned that the American Dream Movement is about Shannon McLeish and others like her. Shannon and I ate cheese quesadillas together on Monday night. ...