Republicans’ cherubic budget crusader, Paul Ryan, unveiled the latest House GOP budget on Tuesday morning. It won’t become law anytime soon, but it can still tell us a few things about the state of fiscal politics in 2012.
Stick around long enough in Washington, and everything does happen. The party of Abraham Lincoln eventually rallied against the Civil Rights Act. The individual mandate eventually became a left-wing idea. Democrats eventually argued for a cut in payroll taxes, depriving Social Security of its much needed revenue stream. Today we see another headscratcher: The Republican [...]
The members of the powerful Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, colloquially known as the “supercommittee,” brought first-day-of-school optimism and a veneer of bipartisanship to their inaugural meeting on Thursday morning. Don’t expect it to last. The mantra of the meeting, which consisted of vague opening statements and the approval of a rules package, was [...]
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 [...]
For all the melodrama in weeks of Washington’s deficit reduction talks – Republicans walking away from the table, President Obama calling them on the carpet, Wednesday’s purely symbolic vote on “shared sacrifice” from the wealthy – things have actually turned a corner in recent days. We are approaching the end of what I like to call the Five Stages [...]
I wish our Democratic leaders would make their fiscal case as clearly and fearlessly as Michael Grunwald does. To recap: Democrats are in favor of short-term deficit spending because they believe it will stimulate desperately needed growth. And they believe that growth, plus higher taxes (plus the one thing Mike doesn’t mention: inflation) will take [...]
Osama bin Laden is dead and gone. Republicans and Democrats this week came together to rejoice and pass resolutions praising U.S. troops and the intelligence community. Even Donald Trump called a truce. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Congress and the country remained unified for months – some might argue for years. In the [...]
Count me among those skeptical that a new deficit summit/commission/gang will produce bipartisan consensus – and not just political theater. It’s no big secret what needs to be done to reduce the nation’s debt – raise taxes, cut spending or do both. While the details of what gets cut and who gets taxed are open [...]
In his Wednesday speech on deficit reduction – and even in fact sheets distributed ahead of time – the President wasn’t big on specifics. On health care spending, a primary driver of long-term deficits, he was downright vague. In a briefing with reporters, two “senior administration officials” armed with talking points repeatedly stressed that “this [...]
This morning, on ABC’s This Week, White House economist Austan Goolsbee, who won a national intercollegiate debate championship as a Yale student in 1991, offered an opening statement in the coming Congressional debate over a raising of the debt ceiling this spring. Republicans plan to use the necessary move–to keep the U.S. government from default–as [...]
