Tag: Budget

Lawmakers not all pals when it comes to Palcohol It was the debate that launched 1,000 tweets. Should the House agree to a "ban" on powdered...

DENVER -- Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler is not to blame the steep shortfall in his office budget and members of the legislature's powerful bipartisan Joint Budget Committee would see that if only they would fairly review the facts, Gessler writes in a letter responding to committee concerns and delivered in advance of an appearance he is scheduled to make before the committee this week.

The committee report puts much of the blame on the State Department, but has little to say about Hillary Clinton's role. So Republicans put out an addendum.

The Koch brothers are against it. Jim DeMint is against it. The longterm unemployed should be against it -- because it drops their benefits. But it appears Paul Ryan and Patty Murray have made a budget deal.

Prominent Christian pastors in the United States who have dedicated themselves to serving the poor and most vulnerable citizens don't believe in trickle-down economics and they don't believe the problem of poverty should be left for churches to address. More than 4,000 of those pastors signed an open letter to that effect addressed to President Obama and the members of Congress, urging them as they hammer out a federal budget not to make poor and hungry Americans bear the burden of reducing the nation’s deficit. More than 95 pastors and clergy members in Colorado signed the letter, which appeared in Politico Wednesday.

Income tax cuts for the wealthy will liberate the U.S. economy to create jobs and generate revenue and shrink the deficit. That line has become a policy standard on the right and a talking point repeated on stumps all across the nation. It is a cornerstone of the GOP Ryan Budget plan being pushed on Capitol Hill. Yet analysis and statistics and personal anecdotes pile high and deep against that tack as an effective real-world national economic policy. GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who led the state down a path toward deficit swampland, is the latest to try to rework history to suit the tax-cut narrative. As Dave Weigel at Slate points out, Pawlenty's recent big economic speech twists and turns and makes a dead stop at the Bush years, when "tax cuts for the wealthy" national budget policy went into full effect and revenues plummeted and the deficit skyrocketed and the economy withered.

The Colorado legislature will begin wrestling in earnest with the budget in the coming weeks. Education funding is going to take another major hit. That's a really bad idea, says Microsoft billionaire and education enthusiast Bill Gates.

Congressman Ed Perlmutter has canceled Saturday's government in the grocery meeting, which had been scheduled at the Safeway at the corner of Colfax and Garrison in Lakewood. He plans to hold the meeting one week later.

As part of the cuts-heavy budget presented Thursday Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has offered to work for just one dollar a year.

Small-government Texas, touted by Gov. Rick Perry as a model of fiscal health last year, is facing a budget deficit in the neighborhood of $25 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It's no surprise that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman interprets the news as more evidence that the dominant contemporary Republican approach to government-- slash-spending, shrink social services, repeat-- is bad economic policy. Krugman has been battling the accepted logic of narrow tax-slashing policy-making for years but, as the doors open on the new Republican-controlled Congress, his arguments will find even less traction with lawmakers. Krugman's warning about the crisis in Texas, however, may resonate in Colorado, which has been forced by the recession to introduce historic spending cuts the last two years. The legislative session is set to begin here this week and for months Republican lawmakers have been talking about reinstating tax breaks lifted last year as a top priority.