Worrying about long term deficits with official unemployment over 9 percent and treasury bonds rates at near-record lows is inherently an act of madness. It is the antithesis of both progressive policy and basic logic. Left to their own devices, liberals would relegate reducing the deficit to a very low priority in this economic climate. Of course when you’re a billionaire like Pete Peterson and you’re willing to spend millions promoting deficit hysteria, your can convince “liberals” to play into your deficit fetish at even the most illogical of times. Hence the Roosevelt Institute’s participation in the Peter G. Peterson Foundations 2011 Fiscal Summit.

During Tuesday’s State of the Union, President Obama once again attempted to show how “bipartisan” he can be by claiming to still be “willing to look at other ideas to bring down costs, including one that Republicans suggested last year: medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.” While this might make Obama look open [...]

Rahm Emanuel is making practically every staffer in the White House read Ronald Brownstein’s completely uninformed article about the great “free market economagic” cost saving solutions in the Senate bill. This explains a lot about why the current health care reform proposals are so bad. This is probably the single worst piece of news I [...]

The CBO is out with an analysis on the effect of tort reform. Despite Republican claims that it is practically a cure-all for the nation’s out-of-control health care costs, its effect would be very minor. The CBO analyzed the effect of adopting several extremely rigorous changes to our legal system including: A cap of $250,000 [...]