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 [...]

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% [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cuts to government spending like the now-reviled “sequester” are not only “dumb” as my colleague Robert Borosage explained this week. They are literally making us dumber. What’s dumb is to cut money for air traffic controllers and endanger airline passengers and relegate them to long waits for delayed flights. A continuing series Read the full [...]

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 [...]

Affluent business flyers inconvenienced by delays = national emergency that Congress immediately fixes. Cancer clinics closing = Congress does squat, goes home. This is just one more story of our corrupt times. A continuing seriesRead the full series Last week the sequester cuts kicked in at airports and caused affluent business fliers to experience some [...]