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The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of gross domestic product. It is down more than the deficit hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles asked for. This rapid reduction is seriously hurting the economy and jobs, but demands for cuts continue. It is time for Congress and the President to “pivot” to [...]
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A continuing seriesRead the full seriesTell your member of Congress Washington remains focused on a “deficit problem” when there is no deficit problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the 2013 budget deficit will be down 60 percent as a share of gross domestic product from President Bush’s fiscal year 2009 deficit (from 10% [...]
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The research discrediting the Reinhart-Rogoff study is upending the economic policy discussion everywhere. Everywhere, apparently, except for HBO’s new series “Vice,” which recently featured Kenneth Rogoff as an expert on austerity.
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The Senate campaign in Massachusetts will be close and hard fought. Ed Markey, the winner of the Democratic primary, knows he has to run a bare-knuckled, knock down, full bore campaign to win. So it is notable that one of the first appeals to his supporters is to enlist them in telling the president that [...]
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This week, President Obama will travel to Austin, Texas to call for action on jobs. The proposals the president put forth in his State of the Union address – investing in infrastructure, expanding preschool, bolstering manufacturing assistance centers, raising the minimum wage – have been blocked in the Congress, and disappeared from the public debate. [...]
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Cutting Meals On Wheels doesn’t save the government a dime, it costs $489 million a year. Cutting IRS obviously increases the deficit because it lowers tax revenue. Other cuts also increase spending. All obviously hurt the economy. Tell me again, what’s the justification for this? Repeal this foolish and unjustified sequester. A continuing seriesRead the [...]
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Republicans continually drone on about how “government spending” is so bad… Infrastructure, medical research, education, law enforcement… bad … “out of control” … “take money out of the economy” … etc. And so because we have to do something about “out of control spending” we have this sequester. A continuing seriesRead the full seriesTell your [...]
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Adam Lanza. James Holmes. Jared Lee Loughner. Seung-Hui Cho. These names instantly bring to mind some of the worse mass shooting massacres of the last decade or so. But they have something else in common. In addition to reviving calls for stronger gun control legislation, their heinous acts also turned America’s attention to dismal state [...]
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We know how quickly Congress responded last week to air travelers who had to wait an extra hour or two to get to their travel destinations. Imagine waiting 28 years. That’s how long a person — a single mother with a child, for example, working at a low-wage job – may have to wait for [...]
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Sure, we urgently need to repeal the sequester. (You can tell your member of Congress that here.) But it’s even more important to repeal the insane thinking that led to the sequester. That means repealing the deficit babble that still dominates Washington (and provided the theme for the President’s weekly Saturday address). It means repealing a [...]
