Two-Week Tantrum Epitomizes GOP’s Recovery-Strangling Refusal to Share in Work of Governing And so, after 16 days, after a $24 billion loss to the economy, and just hours before the United States was about to pass through its federal debt limit, with potentially...
Republican fiscal stewardship
Deliberate Fiscal Crisis 2013
“Governing by Near-Death Experience” and Other Observations * “This is all about stopping a law that increases taxes on rich people and reduces subsidies to private insurers in Medicare in order to help low-income Americans buy health insurance. That’s it. That’s why the Republican Party might shut down the government and default on the debt. […]
Debt Limit Hostage Crisis 2013: House Republicans Demand Goodies
There are some basic notions that undergird the operation of a democracy. When there’s an election, the candidate who gets more votes is the one who takes office. When a bill is passed through Congress and signed by the president, it’s now the law. And when you lose, you don’t get to demand that your […]
Jobs, Jobs . . . Senate Republicans Keep Vets Unemployed
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” “Where is our honor? Where is our valor? Where is our sacrifice?” —Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), leading opposition to Veterans Jobs Corps Act “I care deeply about the...
What a Deal
Is This What “Winning the Future” Feels Like? “Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.” —Joe Nocera, “Tea Party’s War on America” (see below) “With all this incessant emphasis on deficit reduction,...
Memo to White House: Time to Use the Constitutional Option
* It’s Time to End This Hostage Crisis This has gone far enough. Whereas Speaker John Boehner has failed to persuade his own party in the House to support his proposed bill to lift the debt ceiling short-term—which the Senate and the President would have rejected...
Wake Up to the National Security Threat
From Our Own Domestic Extremists
“Just supposing our national government . . . had fallen into the hands of men loyal to an alien power, then would the people yank the usurpers out of office at once?” * In 2007 we asked, “Is the U.S. an Occupied Nation?” With the country exhausted by war and the Gulf...
“Arguing about How to Defuse a Huge Ticking Bomb”
Burn-it-Down Nihilism Spreads Among Tea-Infused House Republicans [ cross-posted at Daily Kos ] * “From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.” —Diderot House Republicans laughed a former George H. W. Bush economist out of the room on Monday when he tried to warn...
2001 Bush Tax Cuts: Where the Deficit Began
Those intrepid researchers at Think Progress have dug up a headline from Aug. 1, 2001—almost exactly 10 years ago—that shows the long-bleeding fiscal damage done by the Bush tax cuts. Only six months into his first term, after George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus...