All of the original justifications for budget cuts have gone away. The sequester is hurting the economy and keeping unemployment high. But instead Republicans plan to double down on cuts. Apparently their real game is to force high unemployment and desperation for 99% of us to further enrich the 1%. A continuing seriesRead the full [...]

Last August and September, I did a series of eight posts about how, contrary to Tea Party and John Boehner assertions, federal spending was actually very popular. As I said at the time, Americans don’t want less government; they just want government that costs less. The latest installment — episode 9 — happened last week [...]

In case you’re wondering where the Bush apologists on your TV today are getting their bizarroworld opinions about Bush being the most awesomest president in the whole wide world, Politico conveniently published the official talking points:

Here’s one consequence of sequestration that you don’t (and won’t) hear many Republicans complaining about: the IRS has furloughed more than 89,000 employees, due to the sequester.

As I posted on March 1, the sequester — the across-the-board spending cuts ordered by the Budget Control Act– would only become real for most voters when the predictions of the impact of the reductions actually started to have a effect on their lives. The fact that labor-intensive programs didn’t reduce services immediately when the sequester began on March 1 never meant that it wasn’t coming. It always was and the protests that the White House was playing fiscal chicken little were simply wrong. That why it’s hard not be be at least somewhat amused by the mock congressional Republican outrage over the problems that started to be felt this week by airline passengers because of the sequester-related furloughs and other personnel changes at the Federal Aviation Administration.

Here’s one for the “We Told You So, Republicans” file. As it turns out, when you cut government spending arbitrarily and across-the-board it can affect things that your care about and rely on. If you do a lot of flying say between Washington, DC and home, that means you can expect lots of flight delays. [...]

David Frum published an interesting letter from one of his readers the other day on the Reinhardt-Rogoff brouhaha. It provides a fascinating rundown of all the cracked economics that have dominated the debate for the past few years:

Yesterday, Sen. Marco Rubio was questioned on-air by a perplexed Rush Limbaugh about the bipartisan Senate immigration reform bill. The tone was gentle, but the gulf between the two was so wide, it may mark the beginning of a fundamental rift that will break the Republican Party in two, and render it extinct. Throughout the [...]

That’s the question millions will be asking when they see the new paper by my friends at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) corrected the spreadsheets of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They show the correct numbers tell a very different story about the relationship [...]

The “rebranding” of the Republican party crashed headlong into reality again yesterday. The setting was Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill.  The occasion was a FreedomWorks’ rally for the purpose of introducing what FreedomWorks is calling its “New Fair Deal.” I was assigned to cover the rally, and what I there illustrated why the odds [...]