"The good news"?

Answer: It can’t, obviously, which is why Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) doesn’t respond to Chris Wallace’s point.  Instead, Durbin tries to argue that deficit reform has taken place, which is almost as absurd as calling $16 trillion in debt “sustainable” without a balanced budget to, y’know, sustain it (via Doug Powers at the Boss Emeritus’ [...]

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Hype and no change.

Investors Business Daily asks the question, “Is Obama Losing His Media Allies Over The Sequester?” Only those that are paying attention. After a steady weeks-long diet of hysteria, hyperbole, and half-truths, Education Secretary Arne Duncan let the cat fully out of the bag yesterday with his face-plant on teacher layoffs, and now even the Washington [...]

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The higher powers of math, and time.

That’s the plan announced by John Boehner this week, as House Republicans broke huddle and the RNC went into another.  The previous House budget plans balanced the federal budget on a much longer time frame, at some point in the third decade out, and it triggered grumbling from the fiscal conservatives in the Tea Party [...]

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“We are going to require some more revenues.”

Everything old is new again, as Peter Allen once sang. Barack Obama takes a ceremonial oath of office today to start his second term, but it looks like his team is still singing from the first-term hymnal.  Senior political adviser David Plouffe appeared yesterday on ABC’s This Week to give a preview of the second [...]

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The big deficit gulch - in money and credibility.

He certainly claimed to have done so in his press conference on Monday, which even a simple look at federal spending over the last several years belies.  In my column for The Week on Tuesday, I ran through the math: “Over the years,” Obama told the White House press corps, “I’ve signed into law about [...]

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Coinmageddon

And a great sigh was heard across the land. The dreams of a yearning nation will, it seems, be left unfulfilled. Yes, my friends, even worse than when Mighty Casey Struck Out, the Treasury Dept. has ruled out the minting of the $1T coin to solve our fiscal woes. The Treasury Department will not mint [...]

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Plus, Ramirez on the danger lurking beneath the surface.

Peter Orszag argued as much yesterday, and Byron York continues the same argument today.  By splitting the fiscal cliff into two different debates — one on taxes, the other on spending and debt — Republicans shed their worst political position with a one-off concession and can now concentrate on a political strength.  Or at least [...]

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Truth deficits.

During Barack Obama’s speech last night, my good friend Kevin McCullough made this observation on Twitter: Factcheckers are gonna have a field day with this speech… #fb — Kevin McCullough (@KMCRadio) September 7, 2012 I responded: Aren’t you the optimist! RT @bmxradio: Factcheckers are gonna have a field day with this speech… #fb — EdMorrissey [...]

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A big gamble -- that's paying off.

So says Kirsten Powers in the Daily Beast.  Forget Republicans and Democrats, the center-left commentator writes — this election is about Baby Boomers vs everyone else in America.  Mitt Romney has chosen the first major-ticket representative of what Powers calls The Screwed Generation, and Ryan may be their last hope to keep from falling into [...]

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"That's what Clinton would have done. He would have said he made it up. And Al would have said he invented it."

Hint: It wasn’t extremism from Paul Ryan.  Our friend Morgen Richmond goes back to the videotape of the September 2011 talk by Erskine Bowles at the University of North Carolina and finds a direct question from the floor about why the Simpson-Bowles plan went nowhere.  After joking that he’d prefer not to answer, Bowles says, [...]

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Panic.

Man, I love the smell of panic in the morning … at least when it comes from the other side: Some Democratic lawmakers want to make sure that one question does not get asked at the upcoming first presidential debate – about Simpson-Bowles. Three Democratic House members objected Tuesday to a request by four senators that President [...]

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How much worse will it have to get?

At a Capitol Hill hearing today, South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy asked Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner a thought-provoking hypothetical question. The congressman wanted to know: “If this were the last debt ceiling request you could ask for … the final one and you had to make it large enough for all current and future [...]

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Too bad the president's proposals aren't balanced.

Nearly half of all voters favor an approach to deficit reduction that combines spending cuts and tax hikes, according to a new United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll. Twenty percent of respondents said they would like any deficit reduction package to rely “about three-fourths on spending cuts and one-fourth on tax increases,” while another 26 [...]

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"Watch ye purses & bury yr loot."

Thanks to a couple of obscure fellows named Mark and John who decided using pirate lingo made playing racquetball more fun — and even more thanks to humor columnist Dave Barry who made their antics national news, Sept. 19 (that’s today!) has been “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” since 2002. No doubt Dave Barry [...]

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Unimpressive.

A little gem from National Journal: Hoping to trim $600 million in the next four years, several federal agencies and departments will start pooling their purchases of office printers, copiers, and scanners, administration officials told The Washington Post.  Starting this week, the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and Treasury, as well as the Social Security Administration, [...]

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False dichotomy.

If this doesn’t prove the truth of Sarah Palin’s maxim that, to most people, poles are for strippers and skiers, I’m not sure what will. Just seven days ago, The Wall Street Journal released the results of its WSJ/NBC poll, which showed that 56 percent of “ordinary Americans” put reducing the deficit ahead of boosting [...]

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