Deficit

While some progressives are happy with the President's speech on the budget; others are suspicious, recognizing the President's repeated pattern of offering words that are reassuring to progressives while later acting to work against the general principles he asserts in a major speech. As Bernie Sanders is saying: “the devil is in the details.”

It surely is. more »

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Did Koch Industries write the budget deal? more »

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There's been so much noise about what Paul Ryan's budget plan does to Medicare and Medicaid that the damage it does to Social Security has gone unnoticed.

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(Author's Note: Most of this diary was previously published back in January; but I've revised it slightly for these reasons. First, a Government shutdown is now upon us, even though the debt ceiling issue isn't quite at the forefront yet. more »

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Bloggers always wonder why Democrats couldn’t get anything done even when they had a solid majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, while Republicans get everything they want even when they are in the minority. Take the current budget negotiations, for example. more »

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What was the lesson of the 2010 election? Since the election conservatives and the DC opinion elite have been claiming that the public voted for budget cuts. But before the election they ran ad after ad saying Dems cut your Medicare and didn't provide jobs. Now every single poll shows that the public wants jobs not cuts. more »

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A "report" from Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee says that the path to job creation is cutting ... the very things that create jobs. This is like saying that cutting taxes increases revenue. We know how that worked out, and the job-consequences of budget cuts are going to be just as disastrous. more »

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"Clueless." "Stupid." "Middle-class welfare." Sometimes a guy who likes facts and figures gets slapped in the face by reality, and apparently today's my day. Several recent stories showed me how some of these "austerity economics" advocates in Washington really feel about the middle class. I guess I always knew it intellectually, but these stories made me feel it on a visceral level. They let me know me exactly what these politicians and pundits feel toward me,my family, and the people I grew up with:

Contempt.

We're not talking about lofty and imperious disdain, either. This isn't the old-school,"look down your monocle with a lofty air" genteel antipathy once practiced by the gentlemen at the club. We're talking about complete and utter contempt, a repugnance so white-hot it feels like it could melt your face off.

Debts of a Salesman

How else are we to interpret remarks like these from John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives? "People in Washington assume that Americans understand how big the problem is," Boehner said of Social Security, "but most Americans don't have a clue." Boehner added, ""I think the president shrank from his responsibility to lead. He knows the numbers as well as we do."

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Not the wars. Not greenhouse gasses. Not even the deficit. The issue most important to Americans is jobs.

Despite that, jobs failed to make an appearance in the State of the Union address.

The talk was all about business. Business was doing better. Business needed taxpayers to help pay for research and innovation. Business will get government help to eliminate pesky regulations. more »

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Here's something else for the President to consider while he's drafting the Social Security portion of his State of the Union message: Yet another poll demonstrates the public's strong support for Social Security, and its strong opposition to benefit cuts. But this one has a new twist: It shows that, by overwhelming margins, Americans would rather cut military spending than reduce Social Security benefits.

That's true of Republicans and independents as well as Democrats, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. According to the poll's summary statistics, when asked whether they would rather cut Social Security, Medicare, or military spending, 55% chose the military. Only 13% chose Social Security, and Medicare, and 21% chose Medicare. Military cuts were preferred by a clear majority of independents and overall voters (55%), and by a plurality of Republicans (42%). more »

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