On Thursday afternoon, the House Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee held a hearing on the consequences of a debt default. They invited four distinguished economists to sketch a gruesome picture: tanking markets, skyrocketing interest rates, a plunging dollar, a new recession–a grim chain of horrible outcomes that would scare any sane person back from the [...]
“Headwinds” from the first half of 2011 are holding back the recovery, President Obama and his advisers argued on Friday, reacting to an undeniably abysmal June jobs report. While Obama didn’t dismiss the discouraging data as a “bump in the road to recovery” as he did in May, the White House is trying to blame [...]
Friday morning’s miserable jobs report delivered a blunt-force blow to Obama’s overall economic approach and posed a serious threat to the country’s recovery. More immediately, it complicates the President’s already difficult debt ceiling negotiations with Speaker John Boehner by adding an urgent priority: getting another stealth stimulus past a spending-resistant Congress as part of the [...]
Though President Obama and House Speaker Boehner have yet to outline a single idea or, so far as we know, commit to anything, both Democrats and Republicans have begun attacking a so-called “grand bargain” for deficit reduction in conjunction with the vote to raise the debt ceiling. There are the “Hell No” GOP freshmen, who [...]
The recovery’s stall in May was not a fluke: The economy added just 18,000 jobs in June, below expectations and a sign the job market is firmly stuck in the mud. All the news in Friday’s report was horrible: the unemployment rate increased to 9.2% despite a shrinking labor force and prior months’ jobs numbers [...]
The protagonists in the debt-limit dealing are obviously President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, the golfing buddies and party leaders. The Senate’s 60-vote threshold for legislation—and the potential for random windbags to block a deal and crash the global economy—means that Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell get attention as well. [...]
Forgive House Democrats if they’re fuming a bit about the hairpin turn in the debt-limit negotiations. Reports that the White House is willing to consider cuts to entitlement programs as part of a grand bargain that far exceeds prior proposals caught them by surprise. At a briefing with reporters Thursday afternoon, House Minority Leader Nancy [...]
Speaking of the liberal critique of Obama’s debt-limit showdown strategy, Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum concludes that it misses the fundamental point: I think it’s now finally time to stop pretending that Obama has miscalculated, or blundered, or been out-negotiated, or somehow forced into a bad position. Rather, everything he’s done for at least the past [...]
There are really only two men in Washington who have any idea of what’s going on with the race to reach a bipartisan deal on deficit reduction and they’re not talking much. On Thursday, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner gathered with leaders from both parties in Congress to discuss what a debt ceiling [...]
In a new ad set to run statewide in Iowa, Michele Bachmann concentrates on the fiscal-conservative leg of her stool. Still in the early courting stages with Hawkeye voters, she regurgitates her biography first (Iowa-born, tax lawyer, mom), and then she speaks out against the bailouts, against the stimulus and against raising the debt ceiling. [...]
