budget cuts

The conservatives are following up on their decades-old plan to use tax cuts to more »

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Yesterday evening I attended an event sponsored by my U.S. Representative, Jim Moran (D-VA). I accepted an invitation I received from his email list to a community forum called "Principles & Priorities: How would you balance the budget?" more »

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Austerity -- cutting government benefits and services -- is not the path to fixing deficits. In fact, economists warn that trying to fix a sluggish economy by cutting government spending will just make things worse. Worse yet, this approach can have damaging effects that last into the future. This can be easily shown with simple calculations. more »

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Sometimes you can just see glimmers of something through the DC brain fog, other times it becomes so clear that you can't ignore it. The current DC brain-fog motto is, "if it doesn't work, do it more." Today's GDP-growth report shows that austerity isn't working, so the geniuses in DC want to do it more. more »

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Congratulations! The "grand compromise" will cut nearly thirty nine billion dollars in needed government spending, which proves how "serious" everyone is about reducing the deficit. The grand compromisers could have cancelled the next ten years of tax subsidies for oil companies and cut the deficit by forty billion, but apparently that's not how serious people do things.

If the Republican Party were singing to its base today, the song would be the theme from Friends, "I'll Be There For You." And the Democrats would be singing "You Always Hurt the One You Love." We're being told we should celebrate a "compromise" in which Democrats gave up $38.5 billion in spending cuts, when the original Republican demand was for $32 billion. That means the Democrats only gave the Republicans 20% more (20.2135%, to be precise) than they originally demanded.

Okay, guys. You get an extra 20% -- and not a penny more!

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Last night the President took a lofty, almost disinterested stance regarding budget deadlock in Congress. He seemed to chastise Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner equally, focusing on the consequences of a shutdown and ignoring the consequences of making a bad deal to avoid a shutdown.

A Federal shutdown would have "real consequences for real people," said the President, mentioning one "real" person by name: J.T. Henderson of Louisville, Kentucky.

So let's talk about J.T. Henderson - and about all the other J.T. Hendersons who are just as real, and just as important, as our friend in Louisville. You'd be surprised how many there are.

Meet the Hendersons

Who wasn't the President talking about when he mentioned the name "J.T. Henderson" last night?

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It’s federal budget time, and they’re talking 1950s on Capitol Hill. Well, sometimes we can move forward by turning the political clock back. But we have to know exactly where to stop.

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What caused the deficits and rising public debt? The answer comes in two parts: present deficits and projected future deficits. more »

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The Senate is starting debate this week on a $60 billion supplemental spending bill that includes additional money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as money for disaster relief and some other spending choices. more »

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