After Election Day, President Obama will surely face a far more conservative, more Republican Congress. Here’s how he can begin to regain his political footing, reclaim the fiscal agenda, and do the country a huge favor. When Congress returns in mid-November for its lame-duck session, lawmakers will face two central fiscal issues: what to do …
Continue reading “Advice to Obama: Kill the Bush Cuts, Create Your Own”
Fiscally speaking, conservatives are masters of the smokescreen. Rather than confront basic questions of fairness in matters of taxes and spending, they reframe issues to sidestep such questions, giving them more leeway to push for policies that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest among us. For decades, conservatives have forcefully pushed for lower tax rates on …
With Republicans poised to regain the House and, if the political gods shine upon them, perhaps even the Senate, let’s turn our attention to two intriguing budget-related questions that will soon take center stage in Washington: Will Republicans, like their forebears a generation ago, plant the seeds of both their own destruction and President Obama’s …
Continue reading “Government Shutdowns and Their Consequences”
America’s consumers are both the key to the economic recovery and the great unknown. They are saving much more than in recent years, which should bode well for the nation’s longer-term economic prospects but also could keep the economy in the doldrums for some time to come. That’s because, as columnist Robert J. Samuelson notes …
We take it as an article of faith in Washington that policymakers should extend President Bush’s tax cuts for the 98 percent of American households that earn up to $250,000 a year, at the very least. The economy, we seem to agree, is too weak to impose a tax increase on the vast majority of …
For those who hope a post-election Washington will get serious about our long-term fiscal problems before a deficit-induced crisis forces our hand, the news of recent days has been disappointing indeed. President Obama used his Saturday radio address to pledge his allegiance to Social Security, raising the age-old specter of a Republican plot to destroy …
Continue reading “Social Security and the Fiscal-Political Clash”
“Americans have been dreaming since our national birth,” H.W. Brands writes to start his new book, American Dreams: The United States Since 1945. “Americans in 2010 were collectively less confident than their grandparents had been in 1945 that reality would favor their dreams,” he acknowledges a few paragraphs later, because “the world was catching up …