Michael Rainey

Inflation in September registered its lowest annual reading in more than three years as the Consumer Price Index increased by 2.4% on a 12-month basis, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

With states in the Southeast still struggling to recover from two massive hurricanes that arrived in quick succession, the Biden administration said Wednesday that it has already approved more than $1.8 billion to help with recovery efforts in the region.

2-min read The Biden administration has approved another $4.5 billion in student loan debt relief for public service workers, the Department of Education announced Thursday.

Continuing in his quest to find taxes to eliminate for specific voting groups, former President Donald Trump said Friday that he would consider

Michael Rainey 2 min read The IRS announced Tuesday that the standard deduction would increase by $800 for the 2025 tax year, rising to $30,000 for couples filing jointly.

For-profit insurers in the Medicare Advantage program boosted payments from the federal government by $4.2 billion last year after adding diagnoses for patients during home visits, even though those diagnoses did not result in any additional care, a new report from the Health and Human Services inspector general said Thursday.

The Medicaid rolls declined by 7.5% in fiscal year 2024, the nonpartisan policy research group KFF reported this week in its annual survey of state Medicaid directors. The decline is expected to continue in 2025, with the number of participants projected to fall by another 4.4%. The number of people receiving healthcare through Medicaid reached record highs during the Covid-19 pandemic, due in large part to an easing of the requirements for participation and a pause on routine disenrollments. Me

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided roughly $80 billion for the IRS over 10 years for the purpose of modernizing operations and boosting staff, with the ultimate goal of collecting more revenues, especially from those wealthy households and corporations that had been avoiding or underpaying their taxes for years due in part to chronic underfunding of the agency. This new chart from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center summarizes how the IRS intends to use those funds; the chart include

Although the results were two-tenths of a percentage point below the previous quarter's growth rate, the report shows that the economy continues to chug along despite the high interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve in its battle against inflation.

In the wake of two massive hurricanes and a strike at a major manufacturer, new job creation stalled in October as employers added just 12,000 new positions overall, the Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.