When deciding how to move forward with our roughly $100 billion a year war in Afghanistan, President Obama apparently didn’t even take into consideration the issue of cost at least according to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
Apparently the position of our government that when it comes to saving the lives of regular Americans it will only be done if it can done on a tight budget but when it comes to killing foreign people cost is no obj

On an international level I would go so far as to say these three liberal health care plans are all significantly to the right of basically even center-right party in the rest of the industrialized world on health care. “Tort reform” gets more play than single payer. If these constitute the “left flank” of the political discussion around the pressing issue of health care costs in America, we as a country are screwed.

Almost any national health care debate in this country is almost entirely disconnected from real-world examples, which is tragic given that facts have a well-known liberal bias. That is why it is incredibly depressing to see a senior fellow from the Center for American Progress is using his platform to spread incoherent ignorance. I don’t [...]

Become a Member of FiredoglakeGOAL: 1,000 New Members Support our one-stop shop for in-depth news coverage and hard-hitting activism. Going through literally tens of thousand of government documents to find these few nuggets of information is sadly something very few organizations do well (well, besides large, private lobbying operations), but this is something at which [...]

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, [...]

Today, Ezra Klein made the logical and concise case for why Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan wasn’t about health care cost control but just saving the government money by shifting more of the health care cost burden onto regular people. Ryan’s plan works differently. Let’s say health-care costs grow at 8 percent a year — [...]

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 [...]

Paul Ryan’s Republican budget proposal “saves” the government money on Medicare by replacing it with a voucher to buy private insurance, but these vouchers will be too small to actually buy a similar level of coverage to what  Medicare traditionally provided. It shifts the burden of paying for the rise in health care costs for [...]

Paul Ryan’s Republican budget plan would privatize Medicare and dramatically slash Medicaid over time. The result: senior citizens, poor children and the disabled paying dramatically more for care, getting worse health insurance coverage and/or losing coverage altogether, according to a report by the CBO. Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their [...]

Looking at the current political environment and gaming out the possible actions that could be taken it seems abundantly clear that progressives best course of action on Social Security is to simply refuse to even think about allowing any changes in the program. Progressives should also follow Harry Reid’s advice by sticking to this “just [...]