President Obama has promised Oklahoma “everything that it needs right away” to begin the process of recovering and rebuilding, after the massive tornado touched down in the state on Monday, devastating the cities of Monroe and Newcastle. Already hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Association employees are the ground in Oklahoma, and millions of dollars in [...]
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When historian Niall Ferguson made his offensive comments about John Maynard Keynes last week, he wasn’t just revealing an ugly side of own nature. He was defending his authoritarian and economically punitive ideology not only against its opponents, but against reality itself. But then, when your best-known editorial is a 2011 piece called “Austerity Works,” [...]
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Can something be equally beneficial for both the environment and the economy? Leaders of the nation’s largest environmental organizations and labor unions say yes. This week in Washington, the BlueGreen Alliance will be holding its annual conference, appropriately themed “Good Jobs, Green Jobs.” Often considered each other’s adversary, both the labor and environmental movements share [...]
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The Congressional Progressive Caucus and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka pressed their opposition to President Obama’s proposed chained-CPI change to Social Security benefits at a Thursday afternoon news conference, denouncing it as a cut in benefits for those who need the social safety net the most. Fifteen members of Congress, as well as around 45 supporters [...]
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President Obama’s budget proposal is officially released into the wild. The president and the media are talking a lot about what the budget’s deficit reductions offer to satisfy the priorities of the 1 percent – the donor/owner class. But there are things in this budget that help the economy and the rest of us, too. [...]
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Ultimately, a whole lot of this comes down to money: as the old saying goes, "it is very difficult to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it."
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Yes, Mr Prudent himself, the man who "worries" for your grand kids, has been looting his shareholders for decades. I guess he knows a thing or two about debt, but not in the way you think.
I knew he was a phony, of course, by the fact that he didn't say a peep when the budget was in surplus and the Democrats wanted to use it to shore up Social Security. (I guess he was too busy counting his billions during the tech boom to take the time.) But the minute President Bush pushed through his tax cuts (it's yer muneee!) Peterson jumped back into the fray screaming that the sky is falling, we must cut Social Security.
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You’ve heard of the birthers and the truthers, and probably even the tenthers and the nullifiers. But now it’s time to meet the Simpson-Bowlers. Over the past few years, we’ve heard a lot of crackpot ideas. First there was Donald Trump and his jolly gang of birthers, who to this day claim that President Obama [...]
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As I discussed yesterday, David Leonhardt of the New York Times counseled President Obama to drop using green jobs as a selling point for address climate change. Thankfully, last night Obama did not listen. Obama made clear that tackling the climate crisis can be accomplished while growing the economy: We have doubled the distance our [...]
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Expectations are high for President Obama to get specific about his second-term plans to protect the climate, particularly regarding plans to bypass Congress and use the EPA’s authority to further reduce greenhouse gas pollution. The appeal is obvious: no need to wrangle with the climate change deniers that currently run the House. Still, there are [...]
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