Last week, the Republican Congress is expected to unveil its fiscal year 2016 budget resolution just as House defense authorizers start marking up their annual bill. What will that mean for the US military? Bottom line, the Pentagon should realistically expectno more than $569 billion from Congress in the final, enacted 2016 budget between base and… Keep reading →
Hope springs eternal, even here in the nation’s capital. After the election, both President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner made nice noises. And many pundits hailed this, believing either that sequestration would get kicked down the road a fur piece or a Simpson-Bowles’ grand bargain was in the works.
The big sticking point — at least rhetorically — had been that the Democrats want higher taxes on those earning more than a quarter of a million dollars each year and the GOP does not. Then came the electorate’s rejection of Mitt Romney and the Democrat’s better than expected performance in the Senate. Add to that the defeat of several high profile Tea Party candidates and some argued that the stage was set for compromise. Keep reading →