Congress

Budget Battles

  • Food Stamp Program Hit By $5 Billion in Automatic Cuts

    By Eric Pianin

    Spending on federal food stamps was cut on Friday by $5 billion – and Congress didn’t have to lift a finger to accomplish that. Like so much else that is happening in this post-sequestration era,...

  • The Rising Cost of Gridlock

    By Bruce Bartlett, The Fiscal Times

    The great weakness of the American political system is gridlock. It was baked in the cake by the Founding Fathers, who deliberately set up a system in which the White House, Senate and House of...

  • How Congress Could Avoid Another Fiscal Crisis

    By Eric Pianin

    Something strange is happening on Capitol Hill these days: Committee leaders from the House and Senate are meeting face-to-face to try to iron out differences in their competing bills. After years of...

  • The Gloves Are Off (Already) at Budget Conference

    By Brianna Ehley, The Fiscal Times

    It didn’t take long Wednesday for rosy talk about bipartisanship and “common ground” to give way to bare-knuckled haggling over a new budget as the first House-Senate budget conference committee in...

  • Did Yellen Mute the Warning Bell on Housing Crisis?

    By Marilyn W. Thompson and ANN SAPHIR and Alister Bull, Reuters

    When Janet Yellen became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in June 2004, a massive real estate bubble was building in the vast nine-state area that it oversees. Her staff alerted...