Tag Archives: children
Why do so many Americans pay no income taxes?

Why do so many Americans pay no income taxes?

Most of the increase since the mid-1990s in the number of people who owe no income taxes is the result of the child tax credit. This policy was created by Congressional Republicans and expanded with Republicans in the lead.

Read more

Understanding the Kennedy-Dodd and House Democrats’ health care bills

This page contains the most recent version of my list of “things you should know about the Kennedy-Dodd health care bill,” interspersed with parallel observations about the leaked outline of the House Democrats’ health care bill. I will post each time I update this page, so you can track it incrementally.  If you bookmark this [...]

Read more
Understanding the House Democrats’ health care bill

Understanding the House Democrats’ health care bill

Yesterday I posted and described the draft Kennedy-Dodd health care bill.  Today I would like to do the same for an outline produced by House Democrats. Here is a three-page outline of “Key Features of the Tri-Committee Health Reform Draft Proposal in the House of Representatives,” dated yesterday (June 8, 2009).

Read more
Understanding the Kennedy health care bill

Understanding the Kennedy health care bill

Over the weekend a draft of Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) health care bill leaked.  After playing with Adobe Acrobat, here is the text of the draft Kennedy bill as a text file (173 K), and as a single Acrobat file (3.4 MB).  Update:  I fixed the broken link to the PDF. Unlike the leaked version, both [...]

Read more

Health spending fallacy

The President emphasized the importance of health care reform in Tuesday evening’s press conference.  One of his arguments was that reforming health care would help address federal and state government fiscal problems: What we have to do is bend the curve on these deficit projections.  And the best way for us to do that is [...]

Read more

About

About Keith Hennessey About this blog About the National Economic Council About my work in the White House Photo credits Technical credits About Keith Hennessey I served as the senior White House economic advisor to President George W. Bush.  My job was to coordinate economic policy for the President, including macroeconomic issues, financial markets and [...]

Read more

President Bush’s speech on financial markets and the world economy

President Bush spoke at the Manhattan Institute today on financial markets and the world economy. This speech is a prelude to the financial summit the President will host this weekend.  I’ll write separately about the Summit, and about the elements of today’s speech that talk about principles for reform. I want to draw your attention [...]

Read more

Address by President Bush on financial markets

President Bush gave a major policy address on the State Floor of the White House this evening. THE WHITE HOUSE State Floor 9:01 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT:  Good evening.  This is an extraordinary period for America’s economy.  Over the past few weeks, many Americans have felt anxiety about their finances and their future.  I understand [...]

Read more

Food prices & food aid

The President spoke this afternoon about high food prices and food aid.  If you’d like more detail, here’s our “fact sheet”.  And if you really want to dive down deep, here is a transcript of a press briefing done by three senior administration officials after the announcement:  OMB Deputy Director Steve McMillin, CEA Chairman Ed [...]

Read more

Enacting President Bush’s stimulus proposal

About three hours ago, the President signed into law H.R. 5140, The Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 , less than four weeks after he first proposed Congressional action. We are enormously pleased with this rapid and bipartisan legislative success.  The final bill passed the House 380-34, and the Senate 81-16.  Here is a one-page summary [...]

Read more