Republican Paul Ryan, on “Face the Nation” last weekend, tried to somehow claim Republicans posturing about possibly not raising the debt limit unless President Obama and Senate Democrats give in to their demands wasn’t “playing games” with the debt ceiling. From CBS News: Ryan, in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, said [...]

We, as a country, don’t have a budget deficit problem as Daily Show pointed out last night and David Leonhardt explained this morning. From Leonhardt: A trick question: If Congress takes no action in coming years, what will happen to the budget deficit? It will shrink — and shrink a lot. This simple fact may [...]

On his blog, Paul Krugman has suggested one “really radical” proposal to fixing our health care cost problem is to modestly expand socialized medicine in this country. But if you want a really radical proposal — but one that, unlike privatization, actually has strong evidence on its side — why not add a true public [...]

There is justifiably a lot of angry attention drawn to the fact that Wisconsin didn’t really have a budget problem until Republican Governor Scott Walker artificially created one by rushing through a series of business tax cuts. Now, in a classic shock doctrine fashion, he is using this manufactured “crisis” to justify his push to [...]

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 [...]

One aspect of the health care reform fight that was sometimes overlooked, but I think should get more attention in any political retrospective, is just how completely and totally Democrats lost the PR messaging war. Democrats spent a huge amount of time and political capital making sure the bill was scored by the CBO as [...]