I think a big problem with the politics of this debt ceiling fight is that the American people don’t know how incredibly stupid the concept of the debt ceiling really is. This is why the only real highlight from President Obama’s rather bizarre public address yesterday was, for me, that he finally started trying to [...]

I remember an extremely jarring moment during one of President Obama’s press conferences about extending the Bush tax cuts, when Obama said he must give in to hostage-taking tactics. Via Huffington Post: “I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that [...]

To maintain his role as head of the Republican caucus Speaker John Boehner can’t cut just any old deal with the Democrats, at least not now that so much rides on this particular fight. Even if Boehner and most of the Republican leadership want to cut a deal, and that isn’t a given, the only [...]

I’m reading President Obama op-ed in USA Today about the deficit. If I’m not mistaken, it contains the strange message that he wants the middle class to pay a significant portion of the cleanup costs for a mess they didn’t create. That’s why people in both parties have suggested that the best way to take [...]

Reports circulate that President Obama may agree to a massive all cuts debt ceiling package, creating a lot of anger and a sense of betrayal because Obama will fold on his demand that any debt ceiling package contain at least a small amount of new revenue. I can’t understand the amount of anger though because [...]

Given that the federal deficit is basically the only thing that almost every major political figure has been talking about, the fact that the deficit only ranks as a top issue with 16 percent of the country is truly remarkable. I suspect the issue wouldn’t even rise above single digits if politicians and pundits hadn’t been continuously force feeding the public deficit hysteria for months.

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.

The truly historic importance of what is happen right now can’t be repeated enough. It is a Democratic President who is the driving force now behind cutting Medicare and Social Security. It is a Democratic President who feels that deficit reduction during a recession and keeping tax rates near historic laws are both much more important policy goals than protecting Social Security and Medicare Benefits.

I’ve been trying very hard to understand President Obama’s reason why progressives should support his push for a truly big austerity package that contains both Medicare and Social Security benefits cuts, but as far as I can tell it is just illogical gibberish. His reasoning he gave in the press conference was: And so that’s [...]