Four years ago, then vice presidential candidate Joe Biden was pilloried by Republican politicians and their media water carriers (for example, here and here) for telling wealthier Americans "it's time to be patriotic" by paying the slightly higher tax rates of the Clinton boom years. But with the renewed debate over ending the Bush tax […]

In May, Mitt Romney suggested a new eligibility test in the U.S. Constitution requiring that the President first "spend at least three years working in business." It was bad enough that America's would-be second Harvard MBA President forgot the disastrous record of the first. Now, Mitt has chosen the worst possible week to announce that […]

Thursday's revelations in the Boston Globe that Mitt Romney did not in fact leave Bain Capital in February 1999 have put the GOP standard bearer in hot water. At best, the contention if true would mean Romney lied to the American people to avoid paternity for job-killing deals that nevertheless lined his own pockets. At […]

The GOP response to the President's call for higher tax rates on upper income Americans came fast and furious. His proposal, Republicans warned, was "class warfare" and a "job killer" which will "kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession" and still "not give you deficit reduction." As it turns out, the […]

For months, Mitt Romney like John McCain before him has tried to compare President Obama to Marie Antoinette, an Ivy League educated elitist who is out of touch with the American people. Of course, that task is a daunting one for the $250 million man who insists his personal finances remain a mystery to voters. […]

With the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 once again set to expire at the end of this year, President Obama on Monday once again proposed temporarily extending them only for families earning less than $250,000 annually. Predictably, his Republican rival Mitt Romney called the return of upper-income tax rates to their slightly higher […]

Even with four months to go until Election Day, Mitt Romney's shameless lying has already become one of the defining storylines of the 2012 campaign. Theories abound as to why Romney has emerged as a reverse George Washington, a man who cannot tell the truth. Jonathan Chait turned to Freud, explaining there's a clinical term […]

With the Affordable Care Act having passed constitutional muster, Republicans are once again targeting the Internal Revenue Service in order to deny funding for the ACA's implementation. Hoping to repeat the GOP's successful 1990's war on the agency, Republicans like Maine Governor Paul LePage are resurrecting terms like "the new Gestapo" to slander the IRS. […]

Back in 2010, Republicans swept to power in no small part by scaring the bejesus out of elderly voters over supposed Democratic cuts to Medicare. But now that the Supreme Court has preserved the Affordable Care Act, Mitt Romney and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill are once again darkly warning that "Obamacare cuts Medicare […]

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, the greatest threat to enabling health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans may come not from Republicans in Congress, but in the states. With the Court's ruling that the federal government cannot penalize states who refuse to accept the expansion of Medicaid, Republican […]