Stan Collender

I’ve been very hesitant to say anything about the possibility of a government shutdown when the current continuing resolution expires this Friday at midnight because…honestly…I’ve been predicting that one would occur since last year and have been wrong in much the same way that some economists are accused of predicting 10 of the last 2 […]

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad in so many ways: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has proposed a series of changes in the congressional budget process. Don’t get me wrong; the existing budget process not only is not perfect but is close to a disaster. But after a full year […]

Here’s the question I’ve been asked most often over the past week: Will the White House include in it’s fiscal 2013 budget — the one it will send to Congress in February — the cuts it will make in military and domestic spending under the assumption the sequester, which will impose automatic cuts to both […]

Because of the failure of the anything-but-super committee to come up with a plan that included it, I don’t see how “tax reform” can be enacted and start to be implemented until 2014 at the earliest. And even that may be overly optimistic. That’s not to say that some tax changes won’t be discussed and […]

Two things if you’re at all surprised that the anything-but-super committee announced that it has been unable to agree on a deficit reduction plan and so is going out of business. First, you weren’t reading my articles. On August 4 — two days after the legislation that created the committee was signed into law — […]

One of the factors that has been leading some to predict that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (aka, the super committee) will come up with a deficit reduction plan of its own is the belief that Wall Street will be disappointed if that doesn’t happen and that the major averages will suffer immediately […]

October 1 was the first day of the new federal fiscal year.  All of us wish you good health and prosperity in the year ahead.  May your personal revenues exceed your outlays. FYI…The start of the federal fiscal year was changed in 1974 from July 1 to October 1 when the Congressional Budget and Impoundment […]

Over at Talking Points Memo, Ryan Reilly has an intriguing post about the interest of some tea partiers for a new circulating dollar coin because it supposedly will save the federal government money.  This follows a story in the Huffington Post from a week ago about how Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduced a bill that would […]

House Democrats last night didn’t do what they have done so many times before since the 2010 election: they didn’t provide the House leadership with the votes it needed to pass a budget bill. A combination (you can’t really refer to it as a “coalition” because they weren’t working together) of tea party Republicans and […]

When we last left the federal budget debate in early August, the Budget Control Act — the agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling and reduce the deficit — had been enacted into law and Wall Street and the rest of the country were supposedly breathing a deep sigh of relief because, at least as […]