Progressives are not just distraught but befuddled. They ask, as Vice President Joe Biden’s former top economic advisor Jared Bernstein did on his blog, why are they losing the economic and fiscal fight. And why, in particular, are the two parties rushing to attach enormous spending cuts to debt limit legislation while paying little attention …
Conventional wisdom suggests that, in the debt limit negotiations, the two parties are engaged in a titanic debate over the future direction of fiscal policy. Nonsense. The debate is over, and the Republicans have won. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made it official this morning when, in the Washington Post’s overview of debt limit …
“The President proposes and Congress disposes.” It’s an old adage and usually an accurate one. It also reflects, in the budget debate, a longstanding tenet of conventional wisdom – that the president must lead or nothing significant will occur. It’s a belief that crosses party lines. “I think if you’re the executive, you’ve got to …
Continue reading “Follow the Leader: On Debt Talks, That’s Congress”
However much I regularly enjoy Liz Peek’s cogent writings, I disagree with her recent effort to blame President Obama for the current fiscal impasse in Washington that has put the federal government at the precipice of a federal default. Here’s why: First, Peek says Obama didn’t meet his legal requirement to propose a budget in …
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s plan for a debt limit increase not only would take Congress off the hook in raising the limit through 2012, it also suggests a way for President Obama and lawmakers to do the country a big favor by fixing the problem on a permanent basis. McConnell would force the president …
Continue reading “Expand the McConnell Plan, Make It Permanent”
On tax policy, let’s stop pretending. For all of the Democrats’ rhetoric about how they look out for average people while Republicans look out for the rich, there’s hardly a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. It’s all there in the new budget plan from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D- N.D. With …
Continue reading “Democratic Tax Policy: Myth versus Reality”
I don’t know what’s more pathetic – Republican presidential candidates who urge a GOP nocompromise stance in White House-congressional budget negotiations related to the debt limit, or media that doesn’t explore the implications. The New York Times reported over the weekend that “Republican presidential candidates were campaigning against any outcome that smacks of compromise, underscoring …