“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?

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.

That conservatives at CPAC want the government to stay out of their shopping carts because it violates their personal freedom, yet champion government control of every uterus in the U.S. is mind-boggling. The combination of idiotology is astounding, and the hypocrisy of the conservative party is unparalleled. The whole event would actually be quite humorous, except for the fact that conservatives in Congress habitually hold our economy and democratic process hostage.

House Republicans won’t give up on their efforts to voucher-ize Medicare. In fact, Representative Paul Ryan now wants to make it happen even sooner. As the House GOP is currently preparing their new budget, which will include Ryan’s Medicare voucher program, and they think it should now apply a year earlier than planned. In the past, Ryan and fellow Republicans have said any changes to Medicare wouldn’t effect people 55 and older, but now they want to make the cut off to age 56.

It was only a matter of time. As the debate over the sequester’s damaging, “just plain dumb,” across-the-board cuts ramped up, I just knew someone on the right would attempt to draw the analogy between government spending and addiction. “Addiction specialist” and “Fox News medical A-Team” member Dr. Keith Albow came through when he told [...]

This is not a post about House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) exercise and diet program. It is, however, a post about how he’s planning to produce a budget that gets to balance in 10 years without actually balancing anything.

What Ryan is proposing is the fiscal equivalent of him saying that he wants to lose 20 pounds but isn’t going to counting the fat around his midsection to achieve it.

Like I said in the first post in this series, Obama didn’t waste time talking to Republicans in his inaugural address because he didn’t need to talk to them. President Obama’s biggest accomplishments in his first term happened without their support and despite their opposition. And even though Republicans did everything within their power “make [...]

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote that Republicans who were incensed that President Obama had nothing to say to them in his inaugural address should be far more worried the possibility that the president realizes he doesn’t need to spend time and energy reaching out to Republicans. After all,  not only was Obama [...]

Harold Myerson, over at the Washington Post, points out a new report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine contains some bad news about about the America’s health. The title pretty much says it all: “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.”  The summary of the report goes into more detail.  [...]

A growing number Republican Governors are refusing to expand their state Medicaid programs. The Supreme Court weakened the Medicaid expansion written into the Affordable Care Act, when it ruled that the federal government can’t penalize states that refused the expansion by withholding their existing Medicaid funding. That made it easier for conservative governors to withhold [...]