Suppose you are a candidate for President of the United States. Suppose further that you know that over the past 40 years, the per-beneficiary cost of Medicare rose 40% less than private health insurance. Say you also know that studies consistently show that the Veteran's Administration (VA) health care system provides "the best care anywhere," […]

Here in a nutshell is the state of play in the 2012 Republican presidential sweepstakes: alleged serial sexual harasser Herman Cain is being surpassed by confirmed serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. With Mitt Romney stalled and Cain hemorrhaging support from women voters, polls from CBS and Marist show the former House Speaker has surged into a […]

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously told President Bush to his face, "has a well-known liberal bias." That inconvenient truth is at the heart of the expanding Republican war on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Increasingly frustrated by CBO analyses showing that the 2009 economic stimulus worked as designed, that the Paul Ryan GOP Medicare rationing […]

Without any action by Congress, on January 1, 2013 the Bush tax cuts will expire. That would not only return the top income rate from 35 percent to its Clinton boom-era level of39.6 percent. It would also produce almost $4 trillion in new revenue over the next decade, easily dwarfing the $1.2 trillion target now […]

It's awfully tough to be a presidential candidate worth $250 million when income inequality and poverty are at record levels. Of course, it's tougher still when you're Mitt Romney. After all, in words and in deeds, Romney for years has consistently reminded Americans of "the guy who laid you off." Now, a week after the […]

Back in 2005, Republican strategist and Mitt Romney adviser Michael Murphy created quite a stir when he declared of the Massachusetts Governor, "He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly." Over the last few weeks, Romney has once again confirmed what might be called Murphy's Law. The one-time Planned Parenthood donor who […]

Rolling out his plan to cut the national debt last week, Mitt Romney promised to "align federal employee compensation with the public sector." If so, the roughly 2.8 million federal workers whose pay has been frozen by President Obama can expect a big raise from President Romney. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, […]

Addressing Americans for Prosperity on Friday, Mitt Romney laid out a bevy of federal spending cuts which doubtless were music to the ears of AFP's funders, Charles and David Koch. To be sure, raising the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security, capping Medicaid and converting the system into block grants for the states and […]

On Thursday, Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to subpoena all White House documents related to the lost $535 federal loan to the failed solar company Solyndra. But just one day earlier, the GOP majority on the House Natural Resources Committee blocked Democratic efforts to subpoena the CEOs of BP and […]

As the Congressional "super committee" approaches its deadline to deliver $1.5 trillion in debt reduction over the next decade, the best plan may well be doing nothing. That is, absent any action by Congress, the Bush tax cuts extended in December will expire as of January 2013 and so produce roughly $4 trillion over the […]