In Case You Missed It...

This week on Off the Charts, we focused on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget, health care, the federal budget and taxes, jobs, state budgets and taxes, and our year-long initiative on full employment.

• On Chairman Ryan’s budget, we excerpted a paper previewing why we expected Ryan’s new budget to be at least as extreme as last year’s.  We pointed to CBPP President Robert Greenstein’s statement on why Ryan’s new “Path to Prosperity” is, sadly, anything but that for most Americans.  Edwin Park noted that Ryan’s efforts to block grant Medicaid would add millions to the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured.  Richard Kogan illustrated that Ryan’s new budget gets 69 percent of its cuts from low-income programs.  Will Fischer explained that Ryan uses a faulty number to argue that Housing Choice Voucher program costs have risen excessively and floats a proposal that could lay the groundwork for deep, harmful cuts in the voucher program.
• On health care, Jesse Cross-Call highlighted important lessons from New Hampshire’s and Michigan’s Medicaid expansions for states currently debating whether to expand.  Paul Van de Water explained why raising health reform’s threshold for full-time work would be counterproductive.
• On the federal budget and taxes, Chye-Ching Huang excerpted her New York Times “Room for Debate” op-ed, cautioning that policymakers who want to use the tax code to help children should be sure that their policies reach working-poor families.
• On jobs, Chad Stone noted that the March employment report shows a labor market that continues to improve gradually, but that remains far from healed.
• On state budgets and taxes, Chris Mai explained that although the news of state tax collections reaching their pre-recession levels is welcome, it’s not cause for celebration.
• On full employment, we highlighted our kick-off event and year-long project on making full employment a national priority.

In other news, Chad Stone issued a statement on the March employment report and Robert Greenstein issued a statement on Chairman Ryan’s budget plan.  We issued a paper previewing the Ryan budget, and analyses that explain that the Ryan budget would cut Medicaid by more than one-quarter by 2024 and more after that and would slash SNAP (formerly food stamps) by $137 billion over ten years.  We also issued a paper explaining how criticism of Medicaid in Ryan’s recent poverty report misrepresents research literature.  We also updated our backgrounders on where federal revenues come from, where our federal tax dollars go, federal tax expenditures, and federal payroll taxes. CBPP’s Chart of the Week:

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A variety of news outlets featured CBPP’s work and experts recently. Here are some highlights: The case for another stimulus MSNBC April 3, 2014 The Perpetual Bubble Economy New York Times April 2, 2014 Raising income requires mix of minimum wage, tax credits Boston Globe April 2, 2014 The Calculus of Paul Ryan’s Budget Andrew Sullivan April 2, 2014 Long-Term Unemployment Is a Crisis—Here's How to Solve It New Republic April 2, 2014 Think tank: Congress, you fix the economy Washington Post April 2, 2014 Ryan's Path to Austerity Politico April 1, 2014