Grover Norquist likes to boast that 41 senators and a majority of representatives have signed his Taxpayer Protection Pledge. He has plenty of reason to gloat, but taxpayers should be livid.
Grover Norquist likes to boast that 41 senators and a majority of representatives have signed his Taxpayer Protection Pledge. He has plenty of reason to gloat, but taxpayers should be livid.
The deficit crisis is real and must be addressed. But it cannot be solved on the backs of the weak and vulnerable. Every segment of our society, including those who have money and power, must contribute and must sacrifice.
Republicans understand that making things worse now helps Republicans later. The question is why aren't Democrats and the President focusing on making things better now to help themselves and all of us later?
A Tea Party group known as FreedomWorks has provided new GOP congressmen and women with talking points that will help them survive budget-focused town hall meetings which have recently been very confrontational for conservatives.
A crucial question that the public should be asking the pundits and press is: how often does Alan Simpson have to be wrong, and how far from the mark does he have to go, before he loses credibility?
Democrats have handicapped themselves by starting with compromise in talks regarding the economy and deficit reduction, just as they did with health care reform.
Here we go again. Democrats start to unite around a winning economic issue, but major leaders of their party warn them not to go there.
Today, we would rather bicker amongst ourselves than find ways of working together as a team to open up the economy, and rapidly grow our pie. As a result, we find ourselves embracing a no-jobs in our back yard philosophy.
We are in danger of having our economy fail to grow because we were so busy arguing over the harvest that we neglected to plant the seeds.
Every Republican has signed an "oath" with Grover Norquist not to pass new taxes. If a Republican crosses that line, they bring on the Norquist Inquisition, which labels them an heretic and burns them at the polls.
A big national push to build modern infrastructure will ensure America's return to being an engine of production. That's why Congress needs to make room for a National Infrastructure Bank to rebuild America.
We understand Congress is addicted to the military dollars spent in every Congressional district, but an economy built on death and destruction does not create a thriving community.
The Defense Department is just the first casualty. There would be no federal money for public schools, college loans, highways, the Centers for Disease Control or just about anything else most of us expect from government.
Unfortunately, we have yet to embrace the simplest or most obvious solutions for reducing the nation's deficit while also ensuring a continued level of growth necessary to remain competitive globally and head off future recessions.
Republicans announced something they called a "jobs plan" today. This time it's different. It really is. This time it really will create jobs inste...
When the 2011 federal budget was being bludgeoned into it's final form, the Republicans/Tea Party screamed that continued borrowing would raise the co...
I've been pretty aghast to hear claims that large cuts would immediately generate job growth when the opposite is almost surely the case. You can make this a lot more complicated, but when you're as far below capacity as we are it's really quite simple arithmetic.
If the U.S. were borrowing anywhere near as much as Chase bank, we'd have legitimate reason to worry. But in general, borrowing money is necessary to invest in the future.
We're at a crossroads. We haven't closed California's budget gap, and we haven't addressed the pattern of demanding that our most vulnerable Californians shoulder the lion's share of budget cuts.
In DC the elite are gathered around tables discussing budget cuts, but not jobs to cure a deficit largely caused by a lack of jobs and tax cuts. Not at the table: women, working people, the poor or any semblance of democracy.
In 2009, USDA spent more than twice as much buying meat and dairy as it did on fruits and vegetables. What that means is that the USDA used taxpayers' money to buy about $1.5 billion worth of meat and dairy.