Reducing our spending on overseas military commitments is the deficit reduction idea that has the broadest public support across all partisan groups, according to new Pew Research Center poll. Solid majorities of regular Democrats, Republicans and independents all want to see America stop wasting so much money on foreign military commitments. While raising taxes on [...]

President Obama has spent a lot of time and political capital on the issue of long term deficit reduction. He made deficit reduction a top focus of the health care reform law. He create his own deficit reduction commission when Congress failed to create their own. When that failed he spend months talking about the [...]

The Republican congressional leadership have made their six selections for who will serve on the new Super Committee, according the National Journal. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) chose Senators Jon Kyl (AZ), Pat Toomey (PA) and Rob Portman (OH). From the House side Speaker John Boehner (OH) selected Jeb Hensarling (TX), Dave Camp (MI) [...]

It appears that the bulk of the Gang of Six’s deficit reductions come from simply empowering the relevant Senate committees to decide on cuts at predetermined levels. The Senate committees would then write the pieces of legislation that get fast-tracked through Congress. It would be another move by the Senate to consolidate the actual task of legislation in the upper chamber.

A “plan” entails laying out specifically what policies you all agree to change. Saying you told someone else to work out basically every important detail at a later time isn’t a plan. It’s grandstanding. It is just another form of the magic asterisk trick we have used in the past so politicians can pretend they have reached an agreement on really big numbers without actually doing anything.

Ever since news outlets reported that the AARP will not oppose cuts Social Security, the group has been desperately churning out press releases, blog posts and tweets to try and spin their position as one of ardent defenders of the program. As Jane wrote yesterday, if AARP wants credit for ‘saving’ or ‘protecting’ Social Security, [...]

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 [...]

I have long held the belief that when Republican deficit hypocrites talk about “reducing the deficit,” they are simply using it as secret code for “exploiting regular Americans.” They almost never have plans that would actually reduce the deficit. Their “deficit reduction” plans are mainly schemes like taking Medicare and Social Security from middle-class people, [...]