Latest news with #deficit
Washington Post
an hour ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Republicans are adding health care taxes — but not on the rich
Gene Sperling was director of the National Economic Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and was a senior adviser to President Joe Biden. A core principle of the Republican budget bill was that extending existing federal tax cuts should not be counted as raising the deficit because they are already part of 'current policy.' By the same logic, Republicans argued that letting the cuts expire at the end of this year would be a tax increase.
The Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
One Big Back Breaker: Trump law to COST millions their healthcare and add $3T in debt while rich see tax CUTS
President Donald Trump's signature law will simultaneously cause 10 million people to lose their healthcare while at the same time causing the nation's deficit to skyrocket, due to the fact it also includes massive tax cuts for the wealthy, a new analysis has found. The Congressional Budget Office released its official analysis this week, which showed that between 2025 and 2034, spending would be reduced by $1.1 trillion and cause the deficit to blow up by $3.4 trillion. The legislation would cause 10 million people to lose their health insurance, though the review of Trump's 'One Big Beautiful' law did not differentiate between how many people would lose coverage because of cuts to Medicaid versus changes to the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obama Care, the health care coverage-for-all law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010. 'It simultaneously hurts the poorest Americans while nonetheless increasing the deficit,' Bobby Kogan, the senior director for federal budget policy at the liberal Center for America Progress, told The Independent. 'It's actually almost unheard of to see something that cuts spending while doing tax cuts at the same time, right? Because you didn't have that juxtaposition of taking from the poor while giving to the rich.' That number is slightly lower than the almost 11 million people who would have lost health insurance under the version the House of Representatives passed in May. Senate Republicans ultimately needed to change parts of the legislation to comply with the rules of budget reconciliation, which allowed them to pass the bill with a simple majority as long as it related to federal spending. Kogan, who previously worked in the Biden administration and for the Senate Budget Committee, said that the legislation has not only the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history, but also the biggest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, in history. At the same time, it also reduces federal revenue by $1.1 trillion by virtue of not only extending the 2017 tax cuts that Trump signed during his first term in the White House, but also includes additional tax breaks, including a temporary break for tips and overtime pay, as well as an additional $6,000 deduction for low-income seniors. And that's by design. In the earlier iterations of the House of Representatives's budget resolution, Republicans needed to find steep spending cuts in order to extend the tax cuts. The Senate passed the legislation with all but three Republican senators supporting it, but because of the strict rules of budget reconciliation, Republicans could not touch Social Security, and Trump had pledged not to touch Medicare, leaving Medicaid and SNAP as the biggest pots of money from which to slash. The legislation mostly enacts health care changes through Medicaid, namely through requiring able-bodied adults without dependent children to work and by capping the level at which states tax health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes. But the bill also makes slight changes to the Affordable Care Act. Specifically, Emma Wager, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, said that people with income below a certain level could previously enroll in the ACA's insurance marketplace in a special enrollment period. 'You now cannot receive any premium subsidies if you enroll during a special enrollment period that's income-based,' she told The Independent. 'Which, if you have a low enough income to enroll in that income based special enrollment period, you absolutely will need subsidies to help you pay for Your coverage. So that is a virtual ending of the income based special enrollment periods.' But the legislation also makes additional changes to SNAP. Specifically, it says that parents of dependent children have to work and lowers the age of dependent children from 18 to 14. In addition, it would require that states shoulder a larger share of the cost depending on the error rate for payments. Altogether, the CBO found that in the course of the next decade, SNAP would see a $187 billion cut. And there are signs that Americans are dissatisfied with the results of the legislation. A CBS News poll showed that 47 percent of those polled believe that the bill will hurt them or their family while 28 percent say it will have no effect. Only 25 percent of adults believe that it will benefit them.
Zawya
2 days ago
- Business
- Zawya
Egypt current account deficit narrows to $13.2bln in July-March 2024/25
Egypt's current account deficit decreased to $13.2 billion in July to March 2024/25 from $17.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, the central bank said on Tuesday, Egypt's central bank said on Tuesday. (Reporting by Ahmed Elimam and Tala Ramadan, Writing by Jaidaa Taha, Editing by Louise Heavens)
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Rachel Reeves faces gloomy autumn after borrowing overshoots
June's public finances data, published on Tuesday, make a depressing end-of-term report card for Rachel Reeves, as MPs prepare to depart Westminster for the summer recess. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said public borrowing jumped to £20.7bn last month – a full £3.5bn higher than expected by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). That made it the second-highest figure for any June on record, aside from in the Covid-hit year of 2020, when the government was paying millions of workers' salaries through the furlough scheme. The current deficit for the month, which Reeves watches closely, as her key fiscal rule aims to eliminate it in five years' time, was £16.3bn – £7.1bn more than the equivalent month in 2024. The overshoot appears to have been driven not so much by a spendthrift Labour Treasury, but by higher-than-expected interest costs for government bonds, or gilts, some of which rise automatically with inflation, as measured by the traditional retail prices index (RPI). Inflation has been climbing in recent months, hitting 4.4% on the RPI measure. The Treasury paid £16.4bn in interest on gilts in June, the ONS said – almost twice the £8.4bn of the same month a year ago, and £2.4bn more than the OBR expected. The news doesn't look nearly so bad when the first three months of the new financial year are taken as a whole, however – the ONS says the £57.8bn of borrowing over this period is in line with what the OBR forecast in March. That suggests, at least, that the watchdog need not start its autumn budget forecast from a baseline that has already drifted way out of line with its March expectations. But the worse-than-expected June figure underlines how delicate the chancellor's situation remains, with headroom of just £9.9bn at the end of the five-year forecast period, according to the OBR – some of which has already been eaten up by the reversal of the £5bn disability benefits cuts, and the £1.25bn cost of restoring the winter fuel allowance to most pensioners. Potentially much larger than that is the impact of the OBR's summer forecast 'stocktake', which will revisit its economic modelling and could result in significant revisions, perhaps of £10bn or even £20bn according to some forecasters, which Reeves will then have to contend with in the autumn. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggested a shift to Reeves's framework on Monday that would free her from the need to adjust policy in spring statements, in response to relatively small swings in forecasts. The chancellor's team are considering the role of the OBR forecasts, and this kind of change could help to avoid a repeat of the hasty target-driven policymaking that ultimately led to the welfare U-turn. But none of it appears likely to rescue the chancellor in time for what looks likely to be a very tough budget in the autumn – made no easier at all by the worse-than-expected state of the public finances for June.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Health
- RNZ News
Health NZ makes hundreds of millions in savings - but says more are needed
Health NZ is aiming to get the deficit down to $200m by the end of the 2025-26 financial year. Photo: RNZ Health NZ (HNZ) has reduced its deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected, but says more savings are needed to rein it in further. The deficit for the recently-ended financial year was expected to be $1.1 billion, about $650m less than last year's forecast. Health NZ's new statement of performance expectations for 2025-26 says there will be a "particular focus on improving internal productivity and ongoing tight control of costs". It would be "making better use of the overall capacity of the hospital and specialist services... as well as building partnerships with private hospitals", said the 55-page statement. The agency had been losing more than $140m every month late last year, before changes were made. The new aim was to get the deficit down to $200m by the end of the 2025-26 financial year. The government has put Lester Levy at the head of a newly reconstituted HNZ board , after saying he had delivered as commissioner on improving finances and services. Any new spending would be "tightly aligned to priorities", said the statement. It was signed off by Levy at the end of June, in one of his final acts as commissioner, a role created after the board was sacked amid budget blow-out and recriminations in mid-2024. The statement sets out what HNZ will do this year to deliver on its 2024-28 goals. "For this financial year, and the next, we will continue to implement a work programme that focuses on bringing our pathway back to budget, bedding in our regional structures and bringing in new ways of working," said the statement. Among the three key risks was delivering "healthcare outcomes whilst also delivering fiscal efficiencies". Another was workforce relations, capacity and personnel cost pressure. Handling the risks would require stabilising teams, bedding in an operating model focused on local delivery, "with clear decision-rights and accountabilities". It would also require "deepening partnerships with private sector providers where this presents good value". Most of the 2024-25 deficit was due to a $1.4 billion deficit in hospital and specialist services for that period. That was attributed to lower than budgeted appropriation revenue, "investments made to improve access to planned care" - contracting with private hospitals is being overhauled - and other cost pressures, such as gas prices going up. There were also surpluses in other areas, including $270m in primary and community care services. The statement showed the cost of outsourcing personnel is expected to drop from $430m last year to $260m, while outsourced service costs are forecast to rise by 25 percent to a billion dollars. One wildcard around personnel costs this year is paying back current and former staff for breaches of the Holidays Act over several years, which is expected to total about $1.5 billion. So far $522m has been paid back to 70,000 current staff. The rest - to some current staff, balance of interim payments and to all former staff registered with Health NZ - is expected to be all paid out by mid-2026. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
