Budget

As the year-end expiration date for the Bush-era income tax cuts draws nearer, taxes seem to be an increasingly hot topic. So far, however, some expiring tax provisions have largely escaped media attention. These include improvements to refundable tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), that were enacted in 2009 as part of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA). These credits help low- and moderate-income families, millions of whom will lose benefits if the ARRA improvements are allowed to expire – as the tax plan proposed by Republican leaders in Congress would do, even as it maintains tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans.

The $160,000 tax break that millionaires will receive if the Bush-era tax cuts are extended next year does not include the effect of another tax cut that also has remained mostly under the radar: the 2010 estate tax cut. If this tax cut is allowed to expire on schedule at the end of the year, and the federal estate tax reverts to its 2009 level as President Obama has proposed, 99.7 percent of estates will still be exempt from the tax. Read more »

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

My whole life, whenever I would thank my mom for doing something for me (or on those few occasions when I might grumble that she was being a little overprotective), she would always respond, “that’s what they pay me for.”

What she was really saying is that picking me up from school in the middle of the day because I was sick, or helping me with homework assignments, or asking if I was eating enough calcium (yes, Mom) was all part of being a parent. But I know that no one ever paid my mom to mother, even though it is hard and extremely expensive work.

So while there was no motherhood bureau paying my mom for raising her daughters, her employer was paying her a living wage with benefits.

Unfortunately, not every mother receives a living wage or benefits like paid vacation time to attend parent-teacher conferences and school plays, or health insurance to care for themselves and their children. Between the gender wage gap, the concentration of women in low-paying jobs, and a slow economic recovery for women, too many moms are parenting on nickels and dimes.

The millions of women who lived in poverty in 2010 aren’t thrilled about it, neither are the hundreds of thousands of women who lost their public sector jobs in the last two years, but a large portion of Congress doesn’t seem to care about struggling families. Read more »

In an unsurprising but discouraging vote yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a budget bill to implement components of the FY 2013 budget resolution introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). 218 Members of Congress, all Republicans, voted in favor of the bill, which would slash funding for Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), child care, the Affordable Care Act, and more. (Sixteen Republicans and 183 Democrats voted no.)

Supporters have asserted that these drastic cuts – which would cripple programs that are vital to low-income women and their families – are necessary to avoid the automatic cuts (known as the “sequester”) scheduled to take effect in 2013 under the Budget Control Act. New revenue from the wealthiest individuals and corporations would be a far better way to replace the sequester, but the bill that passed the House does not ask for one penny from those who could actually afford to contribute to deficit reduction. Read more »

The ranking member on the House Budget Committee, Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) introduced an alternative to the appalling budget bill the House is voting on and expected to pass today. Rep. Van Hollen’s proposal also would avert the automatic across-the-board cuts to defense and non-defense programs that are scheduled to take effect in January 2013. But instead of slashing Medicaid, Food Stamps, child care, and dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Van Hollen’s alternative would have produced savings by eliminating taxpayer subsidies for big oil, cutting unnecessary agriculture subsidies, and adopting the Buffett Rule to ensure that millionaires pay their fair share of taxes.

House members won’t be able to vote today on Rep. Van Hollen’s bill. The House Rules Committee refused to allow it. Read more »

You may have heard about a new report claiming the Affordable Care Act will increase the deficit by $340 billion, rather than decreasing it by $143 as projected by the Congressional Budget Office. Now, there is a big difference between these two numbers, so you would be justified in asking how this new study could come to such a different conclusion from the CBO, the government’s own nonpartisan scorekeeper. The answer is by using some very fuzzy math.

It’s a little complicated, even for me and I’m a numbers person! But the issue is basically this: Medicare benefits are paid out of a trust fund. Legally, the trust fund can’t spend money it doesn’t have. So this new study is based on the assumption that when the trust fund is expected to run out, the government will simply stop paying for Medicare benefits. This is important because one way the ACA reduces the deficit is through long term Medicare savings. The new study argues that these savings shouldn’t be considered, since the Federal Government won’t be paying for Medicare benefits eventually. Basically, if the government wasn’t going to spend the money anyway, we shouldn’t consider this money “savings.”

But frankly, this is bogus. Does anybody think that the government is really going to cut off health care benefits to millions of seniors? Read more »

You've heard of slash and burn, but how about slash and burden?

On Thursday, the House is expected to vote on a budget for Fiscal Year 2013 introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). The Ryan budget would devastate vital services for women and their families while giving trillions in new tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and large corporations — on top of extending provisions of the Bush-era tax cuts that benefit only the very wealthy.

Let's make it clear that we will not stand for a budget that slashes programs for women and families and puts the burden of paying for tax breaks for millionaires and corporations on middle- and low-income Americans.

Tell your Representative to oppose the Ryan Budget. As your Members of Congress start budget negotiations, they need to know that their constituents expect them to protect programs for women and families — and to require the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.

What's wrong with Rep. Paul Ryan's Budget? For starters, it would:

• Repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Insurance companies could continue to charge women higher premiums than men, deny coverage to women due to preexisting condition, and refuse to cover maternity care.

While Washington begins debate on an FY 2013 budget proposal that would slash federal safety net programs (and everything else), some states facing projected budget shortfalls in FY 2013 have already proposed draconian cuts of their own. Alabama is one of those states, and as Greg Kaufman recently reported in The Nation, the steps Alabama’s legislature takes over the next few months to close its FY 2013 budget gap could be disastrous for struggling women and their families.

For example, at a hearing late last month, a state legislator with a lead role in budget drafting suggested that a 25 percent cut to general fund revenues flowing to the state’s Department of Human Resources (DHR) is likely next year. That’s a huge cut – so huge that the Commissioner of DHR, Nancy Buckner, testified that she would be forced to entirely eliminate the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and child support enforcement programs.

Shutting down these programs would be devastating for vulnerable families in Alabama. Read more »

Tuesday, the New York Times published another article in its “Female Factor” series entitled “Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain.” As you might imagine, reading it was like déjà vu. In the United Kingdom, like in the United States, budget cuts have caused stagnant wages and layoffs in the public sector, and cuts to vital programs like child care and pensions. And unsurprisingly, women are hit hardest.

Over the course of the recovery in this country, which officially began in June of 2009, we’ve reported on the public sector job losses that have especially hurt women. Our most recent numbers show that women, who make up 57 percent of the public workforce, have lost an even larger share of the hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs lost during the recovery.

Like American women, British women are overrepresented in the public sector – they comprise two-thirds of the workforce – so they are more likely to be affected by public sector cuts. The British government’s Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the public sector will likely lose an additional 710,000 jobs in the next five years, which will hurt women’s employment further. Read more »

The President’s Budget for fiscal year 2013 came out on Monday and we’ve been doing some serious number crunching all week. Our whole analysis gives you all the details, but I give you the quick breakdown right here.

The main take away point:

At a time when the economic recovery is picking up steam, but millions of women and men are still struggling to get back on their feet, this budget generally takes the right approach – it proposes investments to strengthen the economy and protects the most vulnerable while seeking increased revenues from those with the greatest ability to pay. 

What makes us happy:

We really like certain elements of the budget – it proposes needed investments in job creation, it supports the Affordable Care Act and protects Social Security benefits. It also increases funding for child care and early education, child nutrition, health services for women veterans, enforcement of civil rights and labor laws by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Wage and Hour Division. It makes permanent improvements in tax credits for lower-income working families that were part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and increases the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for low- and middle-income families with child care expenses. Finally, the budget takes key steps toward a tax system that would require millionaires and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. Read more »

The Budget Control Act enacted in August required both the House and Senate to vote on a balanced budget amendment (BBA) to the Constitution before the end of this year. As we reported last month, the BBA failed in the House.

Today, two versions of a BBA failed in the Senate: S.J. Res. 10, introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and S.J. Res. 24, introduced by Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO). S.J. Res. 10 would have required even more extreme spending cuts than the BBA rejected in the House (H.J. Res. 2), as it imposed a strict cap on annual federal expenditures and required a two-thirds vote to raise taxes in any way. S.J. Res. 24 did not include these provisions and would not have applied to Social Security – but either amendment would have resulted in drastic cuts to programs that women and their families depend on, while making recessions longer and deeper. (See our post here for a refresher on the threats posed by any BBA.) Read more »