President Obama’s new budget attempts to define a progressive alternative to conservative demands for a politics of austerity. Having just returned from a gathering of center-left parties in Copenhagen, I can report that European progressives are wrestling with the same challenge, and are reaching similar conclusions. There was wide agreement that the wrong answer is […]
Writing for the Daily Beast, Will Marshall argues that Obama is in a strong position to challenge the new Congress to pass a fiscal grand bargain early in 2013: The fiscal cliff deal finally passed by the House Tuesday night isn’t likely to lift the public’s rock-bottom esteem for the nation’s elected leaders. It took […]
Writing for U.S. News & World Report, Jason Gold explains the impact of the fiscal cliff on homeowners. With the clock ticking, the nation is engrossed in Washington’s horse wrangling over the fiscal cliff, a nasty double whammy of spending cuts and tax hikes that experts predict could usher in another crippling recession. But while Democrats defend […]
As the presidential candidates debate the fate of Medicare, it’s worth noting a very simple fact: Mitt Romney paid only 0.07% of his income in Medicare taxes in 2010. By comparison, the typical American worker paid 1.45% of his or her income in Medicare taxes plus an equal amount paid by the employer. In other […]
Recently, the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds issued their annual report on the future of America’s entitlement programs. As usual, the news was bleak: Social Security is now expected to go bust in 2033, three years earlier than projected last year. In their report, the Trustees also issued a sober warning: […]
In February, the “invisible primary” for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination was kicked off in Washington by the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. On Friday, a second CPAC event will be held in Orlando in deliberate proximity to tomorrow’s Fox/Google candidates’ debate and Saturday’s Florida GOP presidential straw poll (CPAC will not […]
As President Obama begins taking the budget deficit battle show on the road, he faces a number of obvious challenges. But perhaps the most pressing one is this: In the hyper-polarized political environment, how does a President whose approval ratings are stuck in the 40s successfully make the public case for a serious deficit reduction […]
As progressives pounce on Rep. Paul Ryan’s new budget proposal, they should also give the man a little credit. The plan he unveiled today is a daring attempt to define an actual conservative governing philosophy. That’s a big improvement on the reactionary and crotchety anti-government platitudes served up by the Tea Party. And while progressives […]
In 2008, Democrats enjoyed a solid advantage in partisan identification. By 2010, that advantage had largely evaporated. As I detailed in a previous post, in every state, the Democratic partisan ID advantage has declined, and by an average of nine percentage points. But the decline has not been equal across the nation. In fact, there […]
President Obama’s new budget is a highly tactical exercise in fiscal minimalism. It proposes just enough spending cuts to be plausible, while putting off the critical work of tax and entitlement reform. Its unspoken premise seems to be: Given the ax-wielding frenzy that grips House Republicans, the best the White House can do now is […]
