If the President decides to give into Republican demands to cut this kind of deal, thinking that launching a civil war with people like me who were part of his winning coalition in the election is better for the country and worth the trade-off, he will do what feels like he should.

One of the most maddening features of the current fiscal cliff/fiscal swindle debate is that the chattering class rarely acknowledges the people who have already fallen off the cliff: 5 million Americans who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks. The roughly 7 million people who aren’t even counted as unemployed because even though [...]

Progressives in Congress aren’t falling for the trick that Washington is using to cut Social Security in the  “fiscal cliff” negotiations. Instead they are raising their voices against the insanity of Democrats committing political suicide by: destroying their credibility, reneging  on their promise to keep Social Security “off the table” during “fiscal cliff” negotiations, and [...]

News reports say the President’s proposed deal includes the “chained CPI,” which would impose drastic Social Security cuts and tax hikes for everybody but the wealthy.  And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that “Democrats will stick with the President.” They should both think again. The “chained CPI” is being offered as part of a “deficit reduction” [...]

The latest proposal to cut Social Security coming from our out-of-touch DC elites literally says that because old people cut back to cat food when people food is expensive, then we shouldn’t let Social Security rise enough to keep covering people food. It literally says that. There is a Social Security proposal circulating among the [...]

Progressive Caucus member Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., is working to get her colleagues to sign a letter pledging to oppose a “fiscal cliff” deal that would include a particularly pernicious cut in Social Security benefits. It is pernicious because if it gets included in a tax-and-spending agreement between the Obama administration and Congress it won’t [...]

More than 30 of the wealthiest Americans have signed a letter to Congress and the Obama administration arguing that the estate tax should be raised, not lowered, especially at a time when much of the political establishment is calling for the already economically vulnerable to surrender more of their financial security as the price for [...]

Cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security hurt PEOPLE. Raising tax rates on the wealthy is just money. They do not equate, do not trade them. Please join Monday’s big, national event and add your voice. The “Lame Duck” — unelected — Congress is deep in negotiations over the ‘fiscal cliff.’ Republicans are holding us [...]

What happened to jobs? The pubic wants government to do something about jobs and getting the economy moving, and in DC the only thing is this weird argument about … anything but jobs and getting the economy moving! “Fiscal cliff?” What about jobs? Fixing the economy will fix the debt, not the other way around. [...]

If any conference was in need of a disruption, it was the “Fix the Debt” roundtable held this morning in the bowels of the Grand Hyatt hotel in downtown Washington. It took a group of protestors—among them a couple of African-American senior women, a male college student, a young women who said “my great grandfather [...]