–Larry Summers describing his impression of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who came to complain to him, when he served as Harvard’s president, about fellow student and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Less than two weeks before Congress hits its deadline to raise the debt ceiling, the path toward an agreement on deficit reduction remains murky. White House negotiations have slowed. House Republicans have coalesced behind a plan that can’t pass. And while the Gang of Six has resurfaced, earning kudos from the President and sparking glimmers [...]
Once again, U.S. automakers are arguing that stricter fuel efficiency standards will ruin their businesses. Evidently, they prefer to do that themselves. But maybe they think we’ve forgotten that we just bailed out their sorry rear bumpers. Maybe they think we’ve forgotten that they spent decades clinging to their gas guzzlers and fighting off efficiency [...]
–Republican Senator turned Goldman adviser Judd Gregg handicapping debt ceiling negotiations on a company conference call. [Via]
Some agitprop from the White House, which also happens to be true, and not just because there is basically no one in America who is not disappointed by politics right now.
Washington’s debt ceiling hysterics have gotten the public’s attention; 82% now say failing to raise would cause economic harm. Steve Gandel extrapolates from the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers on what sweeping deficit reduction could do to growth: [CBO's] Elmendorf estimates that the deal would likely slow the economy by as much as 0.6% in each [...]
Washington, D.C. Barack Obama set a record last week when his campaign announced a second-quarter fund-raising haul of $86 million, but his aides focused on another milestone: “We didn’t accept one single dollar from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs, a commitment no other presidential campaign has made,” boasted campaign manager Jim Messina. But those [...]
At a White House meeting on July 7 when President Obama told congressional leaders he wanted a grand bargain on deficit reduction, Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat and a member of the bipartisan so-called Gang of Six, began to suggest that the gathered leaders look at the Gang’s work as a starting point [...]
Well, this was one of the more exhilarating days of legislative politics we’ve had in quite some time. The Senate’s Gang of Six came up with the deal everyone thought impossible–upwards of $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases with some very attractive tax reform [...]
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