With the 18 members of the Catfood Commission expected to vote on the Simpson-Bowles draft report on Friday, many of the members are stepping forward to declare their positions. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) come out as a firmly against the proposal, while Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) said he was leaning no. According to Politico: Rep. [...]

Michael Bennet gets caught in a moment of rare honesty with an open mike in the Senate: “It’s all rigged. The whole conversation is rigged. The fact that we don’t get to a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck. It’s just rigged.” Of course it is.  They [...]

Don’t touch my what now? In the week since the biggest travel day of the year, the public attention paid to the TSA’s porno scanners and aggressive groping has plummeted.

The basic story line appears to be that since airports functioned without hiccups from porno scanner opt-outs during the Thanksgiving travel season, the media “overblew” a “false alarm” story. Yet we’re no longer talking about porno scanners and groping because the Thanksgiving holiday passed without incident; no major delays, and even more importantly, no new “don’t touch my junk” videos or similar incidents.

But it was almost too quiet over Thanksgiving…

After fully studying the deficit reduction proposal put forward by Catfood Commission co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles (PDF), I realized that I could write a 55-world proposal that would do a substantially better job of reducing the federal debt. I’m calling the “Super Awesome Deficit Plan” and here it is: Starting in 2016, to [...]

Beyond the Deficit Commission’s non-report total cop-out on health care, what disturbs me is what changes they do recommend: embracing the economagic myth that the way to control health care costs is just to make regular people pay even higher co-pays, deductibles, and out of pocket costs. This idea that we can reduce overall health [...]

When I examine any “plan” to reduce the national debt I always go straight to the section on health care, and not just because I’m an expert on health care reform. As you can clearly see from this graph from the CBO, our long-term deficit problem is almost exclusively a health care cost problem. Any [...]

With Washington in the grips of a new wave of deficit hysteria and people in power feeling at this moment an overwhelming desire to make the less advantaged among us sacrifice in the name of austerity, it is normal for progressives to sound defensive around the cackle of deficit chickenhawks. While it is critical that [...]