Members of Congress will vote Wednesday to freeze their salaries through 2013 and impose the same pay limitation on non-military federal workers. The vote in the U.S. House comes just two days after the Congressional Budget Office confirmed that federal workers are paid 16 percent more in total compensation — a conclusion similar to research conducted by The Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. “Study after study has shown that when compared to the private sector, the federal government on average pays more than required to recruit and retain a … More
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Medicare is in dire need of reform. This week’s chart illustrates why the entitlement program is the largest driver of long-term runaway deficits. With the country’s population aging and increasingly dependent on health care, Medicare’s cost to taxpayers is projected to rise from $522.8 billion in 2010 to $932 billion in 2020. The Heritage Foundation has long championed reforms for Medicare, most recently as part of Saving the American Dream. Heritage’s Bob Moffit recently outlined a two-stage approach to reform. The first step is saving the current program, then moving … More
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The accounting methodology used to measure the cost to taxpayers of federal loan guarantee programs such as the one that financed defunct solar company Solyndra may dramatically understate the programs’ financial risk to taxpayers. Simply put, the federal government ignores administrative costs and the risks of borrowers defaulting on their obligations. Under the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, the cost of federal financing is measured according to a discounted rate based on the cost of lending Treasury securities. That includes the cost of average losses from loan defaults, but … More
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Following the failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) criticized liberals for insisting that any deal include a massive tax hike. In a speech at Heritage last week, he said tax revenue isn’t the problem facing the United States in the future; it’s the massive increase in federal spending. “It’s actually arithmetically impossible to solve this problem on the tax side alone,” said Toomey, who noted that Democrats on the Super Committee wanted to hike taxes by $1 trillion without making any fundamental reforms … More
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