It seems not only the President of the United States but a large bipartisan group of senators have developed a love for the comically unserious idea of automatic budget triggers. From Bloomberg: Proposals being circulated among the bipartisan “Gang of Six” Senate negotiators, and about 20 other lawmakers in both chambers, would set deficit-cutting targets, [...]

It seems President Obama has succeed in shifting the deficit debate dramatically to the right. The right-of-center plan Obama laid out that relies on two parts spending cuts for every one part new tax revenue has already been declared the left extreme in the debate by top senate Democrats. From ABC News: Senator Dick Durbin, [...]

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 [...]

The deficit reduction plan President Obama vaguely outlined yesterday lacks basic credibility. The problem isn’t that the math doesn’t add up–it is at least a dramatic improvement over Republican Paul Ryan’s plan, which literally defies logic and basic math. This issue is that many of the reductions President Obama promised yesterday come from actions that [...]

It seems many on the left, like Paul Krugman, are quite happy with President Obama’s deficit speech. I will even admit to it being much better than what I feared, but that is only because some truly terrible trial balloons managed to set expectations incredibly low to begin with. The important point of the speech [...]

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 [...]

When health care reform was first passed, elected Democrats told progressives not to worry about how bad the bill actually was because it would serve only as a “starter home” that would be improved on later. Since then, however, several changes have been or will be signed into law by President Obama, all of which [...]

At the end of the health care debate, when Obama was desperate to get the final bill passed in the House, he agreed to make a deal with Bart Stupak (D-MI) on the issue of abortion, by offering an executive order that restricted the availability of insurance coverage for reproductive health. The right to abortion [...]

As last week drew to a close, the Republicans that control only the House of Representatives clearly bested President Obama and the Democrats that control the Senate in the budget fight.  Speaker John Boehner, despite controlling only one third of the relevant institutions in the budget fight, was able to get the President to agree [...]