So, according to Brian Beutler, the Republicans are balking at having a conference to iron out the differences between the Senate and House budgets. This is hypocritical in the extreme,obviously, since they’ve been braying about the Democratic senate failing to produce a budget for years and now that they have one, they don’t want one. [...]
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Some details are emerging about the so-called “softening” of the Chained-CPI for the most vulnerable. Here’s one analysis of what we know so far from Shawn Fremsted at CEPR:
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Mark this day. For the first time in history, a Democratic president has officially proposed to cut the Democratic Party's signature New Deal program, Social Security. God help us if the Republicans wise up and take this deal. After all, it's a more conservative budget than even their hero Ronald Reagan ever submitted.
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Jonathan Chait flagged this quote from Eric Cantor today and came up with an interesting theory as to why he said it: Mr. Cantor complained that the president, while insisting on additional tax increases, still has not embraced the structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that he says are needed to strike a [...]
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“We must embrace the need for modest reforms—otherwise our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children.” President Obama, State of the union address, 2013 Is that really true?
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This is how they achieve their long term goals — under the radar, changing the way the numbers are calculated to prove an ideological point and change our understanding of how the world works. The story says the Senate endorsed “a model called ‘dynamic scoring,’ which assumes that tax cuts will pay for at least [...]
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It would seem so: Speaking to Megyn Kelly about the Supreme Court’s hearing on Proposition 8, O’Reilly–who has previously compared gay marriage to bestiality–appeared to have “evolved” on the subject. He said he didn’t “feel that strongly” about gay marriage “one way or another” and thought the decision should be left to individual states. “I [...]
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David Ignatius wrote his Iraq mea culpa today and it's a good one. He admits that Iraq was an epic strategic blunder and that he was wrong to have been such an enthusiastic cheerleader for it. But in chronicling his mistakes, I find this one to be almost shocking coming from a sophisticated man of the world.
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Jared Bernstein has posted some very important information that one can only hope both the White House and the Democrats are aware of and prepared to change direction because of. It shows that our runaway medical costs are actually slowing down and he posits that there's good reason to believe that it's permanent rather than transitory.
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Did you also know that none of that, by law, can go to fund Social Security's projected "shortfall?" And that if they do change that law, it will forever put an end to the dedicated revenue stream that keeps SS out of the general budget? I'm afraid so.
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