Reforms.

Many of the wildly debt crisis-laden EU countries are currently railing against the oh-so-draconian, unacceptably harsh, and practically inhumane “austerity” budgets toward which their years of state-sponsored profligate living are now herding them, but up in Scandinavia, things are taking a slightly less dire turn. A couple of months back, Mary Katharine highlighted the steps [...]

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Budgets.

Guy Benson has a useful bullet-point summary. This budget is less realistic than Ryan’s last two budgets, but that’s because the purpose of introducing a budget this year is different than it was the past two years. Philip Klein explains the wishful thinking involved: Ryan’s budget is likely to come under criticism from several fronts, [...]

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Budgets.

Voters are divided on whom they like in the great debates over the budget and spending cuts. By 45-37 percent, they blame congressional Republicans more than Obama for the recent failure to find a better alternative to reducing deficits than the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts now taking effect. Twelve percent said both shared [...]

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Outreach.

President Barack Obama hopes to spark a pitchfork revolt against Republicans over sequester-induced budget cuts — but many Democrats fret that he’s undermined that effort with an early strategy marred by hype, poor planning and muddled messaging… “I think they probably went over the top in terms of saying that the consequences were going to [...]

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Panic.

The automatic budget cuts set to take hold this week were roundly condemned Sunday as governors, lawmakers and administration officials hoped for a deal to stave off the $85 billion reduction in government services. Suggestions intended to instill a spirit of compromise included bringing all sides to the bargaining table, where they could act like [...]

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Real talk.

Sitting down with reporters this morning, House Speaker John Boehner offered his pre-State of the Union thoughts on President Obama’s recent political maneuvers — and how. Via CNN: “To do the kind of heavy lifting that needs to be done, I don’t think he’s got the guts to go do it,” Boehner told a group [...]

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Gulp.

As Republicans search for ways in which the party can more effectively make its case for free-markets and slimmer tax codes as the best and most efficient means to create the healthiest, most prosperous societies, many of the country’s 30 GOP governors are looking to turn their states into models of the ways in which [...]

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"Hard choices"?

President Barack Obama insisted four years ago that the nation must make “hard decisions” to preserve entitlement programs. But on Monday, the “hard choices” he spoke of on health care and the deficit came with a major caveat: He’s not willing to give up much… The president has never precisely defined what hard choices he [...]

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Long time coming.

Republicans blame Barack Obama for the national-debt explosion, and for good reason; about a third of the existing national debt has accrued in his four years in office.  Democrats blame George W. Bush for it, as deficits returned during his eight years after a momentary respite under Bill Clinton and a (briefly) fiscal-conservative Republican Congress.  [...]

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"Catastrophic."

In the first closed-door meeting of the Republican majority in the new Congress, newly reelected House Speaker John A. Boehner on Friday promised a robust fight with President Obama to cut spending in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit. The Ohio Republican doubled-down on his insistence that there must be at least a dollar-per-dollar [...]

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Unserious.

It’s the deficit-reduction package that doesn’t reduce the deficit. It’s the debt-ceiling deal that doesn’t touch the debt ceiling (and doesn’t cut debt). It’s the long-term entitlement negotiation that—after nearly three years of wheedling—does not delay, let alone stave off, a Baby Boomer retirement bomb currently on pace to swallow half of federal outlays by [...]

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Collapse.

House Speaker John A. Boehner kicked off the 112th Congress by saying Americans are ready for an adult conversation on spending and deficits. Two years later, that broader conversation has yet to happen, either in the country or in the halls of Congress, where lawmakers were poised Monday to once again nibble at the deficit [...]

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Raise the roof.

I didn’t believe this when I saw it at WaPo yesterday, then I started to wonder when I read Ed’s post this morning, and now Ezra Klein claims Democrats are telling him the same thing. I thought the GOP’s big Plan B alternative to a grand bargain was to extend the Bush tax cuts for [...]

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Straight talk.

Earlier this week, Sen. Marco Rubio called out the fundamental unseriousness of President Obama’s fiscal-cliff plan and accused him of merely trying to win a political trophy rather than solve any substantive problems. Sen. Jim DeMint echoed that message on Thursday morning, simply and succinctly laying out the case that our only real problem is [...]

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Face to face.

Breaking the pattern of presumably frosty phone calls only, President Obama and Speaker Boehner continued in their recent it’s-just-you-and-me-now, closed-off-from-the-public communications but actually met in person (and in private) at the White House on Sunday. The president and the speaker met Sunday afternoon at the White House for the first time in weeks. It came [...]

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Gridlock.

With 24 days remaining to strike a deal, the two sides remain far apart. House Speaker John Boehner claimed Friday that President Obama’s offers are just “more of the same.” Democrats say Republicans have to give more on taxes before they can reach a serious agreement. Given this divide, it may seem counterintuitive that lawmakers [...]

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Leverage?

 *** *** One month before the deadline, negotiations between President Barack Obama and Republicans to save the economy from a plunge over the fiscal cliff are still in the throat-clearing stage. Serious bargaining is on hold while the two sides vie for political leverage. Deal or no deal, nothing is likely to become clear until [...]

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Let it burn?

Lottttt of support in the comments to the last thread for the “let it burn” option. Here’s a variation on it from Jim Geraghty that I kinda like, just because it would force the public in the starkest way to face the consequences of a metastasizing entitlement state: At this moment, Republicans in Congress need [...]

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"Listen, this is not a game."

In case you were wondering why his phone call with O yesterday was reportedly so “curt,” here’s why. Now, a request: Paint me a picture in which the GOP’s leverage not only increases if we go over the cliff, but increases so much that it’s worth assuming the considerable political risk, and economic damage, involved [...]

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Compromise?

Republican unity against raising tax rates for the wealthy began to show cracks on Wednesday after a conservative congressman said he would back an agreement with President Barack Obama to raise rates on the rich but extend tax cuts for income below $250,000. With Congress scrambling to avert a series of tax increases and spending [...]

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Lunch money.

Over and over and over again, we’ve heard the president, the White House, and various Democrats intone that we need to find a “balanced” approach to solving the impending debt crisis, but Democrats have conveniently neglected to match their proposed ‘Clinton-era’ tax increases with Clinton-era levels of government spending, which would obviously require mega-cuts. The [...]

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Clarification.

Speaker of the House John Boehner got quite a bit of flack a couple weeks ago when he said that “ObamaCare is the law of the land” in response to a question about whether he’d continue to try and get the massive bureaucratic nightmare repealed — I think it smacked of “time to give up [...]

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Grand bargain?

The media’s hyperventilating over this as an early sign that the House GOP has been chastised by last night’s presidential/Senate whupping. (WaPo.com’s front-page headline: “A quick pivot after election.”) But … isn’t this always what Boehner says when asked about a grand bargain? Republicans are “willing to accept new revenue” to tame the soaring national [...]

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So ... what about that IPAB, then?

Via PJ Media and Washington Free Beacon, Joe Biden gives us a little insight into future of Democratic governance.  Bryan Preston gets a chuckle out of this, wondering if Biden thinks that his daughters are entitled to vasectomies, and tells the Vice President that the Onion “want[s] their writers back.” There is more to this [...]

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Makers and takers.

A top advisor to Mitt Romney said Tuesday that the controversy over the GOP nominee’s comments about President Obama’s supporters as dependent on government and not paying income taxes would blow over. “It has to,” said senior advisor Kevin Madden, though he said that whether the dust-up would subside was partly dependent on the media. [...]

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