News & Comment

The polling since the conventions shows that Democrats are doing better than expected. President Obama now apparently has a clear lead over Mitt Romney. Democratic Party control of the Senate seems likely to survive this election year of many more Democratic rather than Republican Senate seats up for election. read more »

Bob Woodward's releasing a new book, so we are now seeing articles based on it. read more »

President Obama is enjoying a post-convention bump in job approval (Gallup says 7 percentage points – from 45 to 52 percent) after the negative and divisive Republican convention, followed by the energetic populism of the Democrats in Charlotte. read more »

Who else thinks the President's speech didn't include any plans to create the 29 million ful read more »

There are many fine passages in Obama's speech tonight, of course. I would expect nothing less. He's great at this stuff and I'm sure he fired up the base and brought over some undecideds too. But you had to know that I was going to look at what he said about deficits. Here's the main passage. It's very interesting. He promised not to cut the safety net in return for tax cuts. read more »

Their opponents shouldn't be too quick to call Republicans "crazy." It makes more sense to employ that time-honored investigative principle: Follow the money. Sure, they've said crazy things -- in their speeches and in their official platform. But crazy? read more »

The rich, those born sucking silver spoons like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, really are different from the middle class. The wealthy grow up and live their lives wrapped in security. That’s what gives them the arrogance to organize a posse to hold down a fellow prep school student and chop off his hair, mock NASCAR fans’ clothes and ridicule cookies offered by supporters. No matter what, Romney and Ryan will remain rich and secure. read more »

Tuesday, David Brooks channeled a deeply flawed presentation by the Third Way to argue that while the federal government used to spend money on things that improved national “dynamism” it now just spends on “entitlements.” You’d have to look hard to find a bigger fan of public investments than me. But, the economic benefits of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are absolutely enormous. They provide a service (insurance against risk, and people value insurance quite highly) much more efficiently than do private-sector providers. In the case of Social Security, this efficiency is mainly in low administrative costs and the government’s ability to provide actuarially fair insurance without needing the compensation that private-sector insurance providers would demand. read more »

Ghosts have nothing on some of the ideas that come out of Washington when it comes to rattling chains and knocking pictures off the wall to terrify the common people. Case in point: the privatization of Social Security. One would have thought that this proposal was done in by two major stock market crashes since 2000, not to mention the generally noisome odor arising from almost everything that Wall Street has touched in recent years. Yet ever so stealthily it's creeping back into the public debate via the presidential campaign. Both members of the Republican ticket, Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), have expressed great enthusiasm for the idea in the past; in 2004, Ryan even sponsored a bill in Congress that was so reliant on private accounts that it was rejected by the Bush White House as too extreme. read more »

The Fiscal Times is a digital rag funded by Peter G. Peterson to propagandize the ideology of neoliberal austerity. Yesterday, a post by Josh Boak highlighted the proposal of “fixing” Social Security by lifting the cap on payroll taxes. read more »