Most of the thought experiments related to using the 14th Amendment to deal with the deb ceiling impasse have revolved around what would happen if President Obama were to choose to just declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional and who, if anyone, would have standing to challenge his constitutional interruption. To really understand how legitimate the [...]

Congress is in a full blown austerity mode right now and any deal that comes out of these negotiations is likely going to be really bad news for regular people. That is why I suspect any deal will just happen to be reached at the last minute, so Congress will “need” to quickly pass the bill with effectively no public debate or time for scrutiny.

Congress is in a full blown austerity mode right now and any deal that comes out of these negotiations is likely going to be really bad news for regular people. That is why I suspect any deal will just happen to be reached at the last minute, so Congress will “need” to quickly pass the bill with effectively no public debate or time for scrutiny.

Is a vote to raise the debt ceiling the same as questioning the validity of U.S. debt? A plain reading of the Constitution certainly indicates this argument has some legs.

At a time of high unemployment, it’s difficult to fathom why the President would be fighting to increase our trade deficit and ship tens of thousands of jobs overseas by pushing his NAFTA-style trade deal with Korea. Even more stunning, however, is the loophole in the Obama deal that will hand billions over to North Korea to spend on their nuclear weapons program.

Regardless if the final price tag ends up only just over $1 trillion or over $4 trillion, can anyone honestly look back at what we have gotten for our investment and conclude it was money well spent?

There is no liberal plan that Sen. Joe Lieberman won’t try to scuttle. Now he is pushing cuts in Medicare as a way to reduce the deficit on the backs of elderly Americans. Hell of a guy, isn’t he?

It is a powerful reminder of how signals from partisan leaders can go a long way to shape the views of their base on some issues. The President isn’t some hapless slave to popular opinion. His bully pulpit actually is powerful and can cause people to change their minds. Now if he would just use it for changing minds on other issues.

Regardless the exact ratio, the likely result is in the middle of a severe unemployment crisis, for no logic reason, our government is going to adopt a package of massive spending cuts. The President has either allowed or actively enabled the conservatives to totally win this fight by moving the debate radically to the right. Now regular Americans are about to lose badly

In the beginning, the idea that any political party would actively hold the debt ceiling hostage to reduce the deficit was considered absurd. Mainly because all the top politicians have admitted they don’t want the country to default and that actually forcing a default would have the exact opposite affect of sending Treasury bond rates [...]