"His budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors."

Via TPM, I … can’t help sharing Liz Mair’s feeling here: Kill me now. Are we for breaking bank on entitlements? MT @tpm Top R blasts O budget as “shocking attack on seniors” bit.ly/YLRLs2 — Liz Mair (@LizMair) April 10, 2013 Justin Green elaborates: Real talk? Those seniors created this mess. They were born into [...]

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Balance?

No wonder it’s taking so long for Barack Obama to send his budget proposal to Congress.  The budget is almost two months overdue, but Republicans may find it worth the wait.  The Washington Post reports that Obama will offer cuts to Social Security in exchange for tax hikes to close the deficit — in effect, [...]

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Bad news for sequels.

It goes by many names — crying wolf, Chicken Little, or just plain hyperbole.  What happens to a politician who insists that the world will end unless his policies are implemented, only to have the globe keep on turning as usual with little impact?  Barack Obama may be finding out, according to a new McClatchy-Marist [...]

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Definitions.

It may sound strange, but budget season is almost upon us.  It sounds strange because thanks to Harry Reid and obstructionism in the Democrat-controlled Senate, every season has budget season for the last four years.  Americans have been forced to ride a roller coaster of artificial fiscal cliffs, tax-rate disasters, sequesters, and other artificial crises [...]

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And let's undo normal order?

Maybe we should call this the Restaurant Stimulus. Stung after the collapse of his Nightmare on Sequester Street strategy and apparently looking to bypass John Boehner on direct negotiations, Barack Obama has asked House Budget Chair Paul Ryan out on a lunch date, coming on the heels of a dinner with other Republicans in the [...]

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Diogenes would be swinging the lamp today, too.

Often, when religion and politics come up in conversation, people want to ask how a Catholic can be conservative — or how a Catholic can be liberal.  We have plenty of both in our community, to the everlasting frustration of just about everyone.  Normally this doesn’t come up too often, but with the retirement of [...]

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Growth

When we think of governments getting involved directly in the business of modulating population growth, one of the first – and most horrible – examples that comes to mind is China. But they’re looking to reduce the population. What about government programs which seek to invest in creating more people? Apparently it’s not a new [...]

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Apparently, it's on.

May I assume that Paul Krugman and Joe Scarborough won’t send each other holiday greeting cards this December?  After an argument on the set of Morning Joe this week over whether America needs to act now on long-term debt, the host of the show wrote not one but two Politico op-eds in the past 24 [...]

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The Age of Cliffs.

Yesterday, Eric Cantor told CBS News that voters want Congress and the White House to start solving problems.  House Republicans will make an offer to open a window for that purpose. In a kind of side-step around the debt-ceiling issue, the GOP will pass a bill that will suspend rather than raise the debt ceiling [...]

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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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“We have to ask ourselves, ‘What is winning in this scenario?’”

What do you do when the opposition’s working night and day to convince voters that you’re an obstructionist, almost nihilistic group that’ll never compromise on anything? Raise the stakes and catch them off guard by proposing a much bigger compromise than they were expecting. Just one problem with this offer: Would the public really view [...]

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Backseat Boehner?

The fiscal-cliff cycle of brinksmanship burnished the negotiating reputations of few people in Washington, but two figures did eventually gain credibility — Vice President Joe Biden, who elbowed Harry Reid out of the way, and Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who took up the reins when John Boehner’s Plan B strategy collapsed.  Look for that [...]

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"It’s entirely possible they’re going to win the week and lose the quarter."

As I wrote earlier this week, the fiscal-cliff deal was mostly a win for Barack Obama, but only a temporary victory fought on one issue.  By delinking the tax debate from the spending debate and keeping the debt limit out of the fiscal-cliff deal, Republicans at least allowed themselves the chance to fight another day [...]

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And counting.

The fiscal cliff deal didn’t actually change that, nor the direction or rate of increase, either … except possibly to make it worse, on paper at least.  Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Reid Epstein remind everyone that while Barack Obama and the Democrats celebrate a win over Republicans on raising taxes on high-end earners, the problem [...]

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"There could be a deal by the middle of this week."

Has the “logjam been broken” on the fiscal cliff?  Yes, says Major Garrett, now at CBS News, although a deal hasn’t been finalized.  His sources at the White House says that the phone call between Barack Obama and John Boehner on Friday night was more successful than previously reported, although from Garrett’s report, the progress [...]

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Compassion.

While I often disagree with Nick Kristof’s take on public policy, I have a lot of respect for his willingness to travel to some of the worst places in the world to write about poverty and oppression.  Last week, Kristof traveled not to Somalia or Sudan but to Appalachia, to discover what causes and sustains [...]

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Dollar For Dollar Act.

In an effort that offers more symbolism than action, Senator Bob Corker has offered a bill that takes Barack Obama at his word on deficit control.  The Dollar for Dollar Act raises the debt ceiling by $937 billion in exchange for exactly the same amount of savings in incremental reforms of entitlement programs (via Instapundit): [...]

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"Everyone's gotta blink."

We’ve been hearing a lot about a civil war within the GOP over the fiscal-cliff negotiations, but is that the only one brewing in Washington? Bob Woodward followed Nancy Pelosi on CBS This Morning, and he claimed that her remarks showed the split on the other side of the aisle. Woodward tells CBS that the [...]

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Waiting on you, White House.

On the House floor on Tuesday, Speaker John Boehner broke from the mutual semi-silence of what’s been going on between himself and President Obama on the fiscal-cliff negotiations, and informed the Congress that all he’s waiting on are some proposals for spending cuts from the White House on which they would be willing to make [...]

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Because that's how fiscally responsible I am.

As Ed thoroughly outlined this morning, one of the fiscal-cliff contingency plans Republicans have reportedly been considering as an option would be to agree to Obama’s tax hikes in order to avert going over the cliff, and instead hold out for substantial entitlement reform next year using the debt ceiling as leverage. But that is [...]

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Including 39% of Republicans.

Well, that $80 billion a year will come in handy, no?  That’s the impression that six in ten Americans have as a solution to the trillion-dollar deficits in the latest Washington Post/ABC poll — and 39% of Republicans, too.  The result demonstrates the political leverage of Democrats in the fiscal-cliff fight, and perhaps the leeway [...]

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"They have to negotiate something on Medicare."

What a difference three weeks makes! Before the election, Republicans said they wouldn’t consider tax hikes, and Democrats insisted that they wouldn’t touch entitlement programs.  Suddenly both sides are hedging their bets, to the point where the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate said Sunday, “Bring entitlement reform to the table” in the fiscal-cliff standoff: Unfortunately [...]

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And the beat goes on.

Well, we voted for the status quo — and by golly, we’re getting the status quo. Do Senate Democrats, perhaps, have any intention of undergoing the proper and legally required process of crafting a budget anytime soon? …Meh. It’s been well over three years; why get into a tizzy over it now? From The Hill: [...]

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Meh. Fiscal insolvency isn't actually a thing, right?

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop myself from wondering how it is that this particular gentleman came to be the majority leader, of the Senate, of the United States of America. …The mind reels. From the WashTimes: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that he will not allow changes in Social [...]

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"His bold vision for the future, is little more than silly, stale platitudes."

Maybe this is the best recap ever of Barack Obama’s campaign, taken from Obama’s own speech this morning in Tampa Bay.  Obama starts off by attacking Mitt Romney’s economic agenda, and then momentarily can’t find his own: Obama’s booklet slipped off his lectern in Tampa. “Where’s my plan? Oh, it dropped. I couldn’t find my [...]

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