Call it the "Seriousness Test." Any so-called deficit hawk that refuses to countenance increasing federal taxes simply isn't serious. After all, as the CBO concluded in January, with tax revenues now below 15%, "levels that low have not been seen since 1950." The two-year tax cut compromise in December made matters worse, adding $400 billion […]

Ten years ago, George W. Bush was sworn in as America's first MBA President. Now, Mitt Romney wants to be the second. Two years after President Bush completed the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover, Romney the perpetual White House hopeful declared, "I spent my career in the private sector. I know how jobs are […]

2011 is becoming a kind of political Rorschach Test; which of its myriad anniversaries you celebrate most says a lot about who you are and what you believe. While JFK's swearing-in 50 years ago conjures up what might have been, Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday commemorates what never was. And the 150th anniversary of the birth […]

At some point in the next several weeks, former RNC chairman and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour will decide whether he will seek the White House in 2012. To be sure, Barbour's path to the presidency is full of obstacles. And it's not just because America's foremost neo-Confederate literally whitewashed the Jim Crow era and […]

Just days after his sneering "so be it" at the prospect of massive job losses which could result from GOP budget policies, House Speaker John Boehner declared public employees have a "machine gun" pointed "at the heads of local officials." That makes Boehner just the latest Republican leader respond to a $175 billion shortfall in […]

Last summer, Moody's economist and former adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain Mark Zandi authored a study which concluded that combined federal interventions beginning in the fall of 2008 prevented the Great Recession from becoming Depression 2.0. Now in a new report, Zandi warns that the GOP's plan to slash $61 billion in federal […]

During the debate over the stimulus program in early 2009, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed, "If the money were lent rather than just granted, states would, I think, spend it wisely and the states that didn't need it at all wouldn't take any." Now would be a good time to take him up on […]

As all eyes remained focused on the union-busting face-off in Wisconsin, the Commerce Department on Friday released a revised estimate of U.S. economic growth for the last quarter of 2010. And that downward GDP revision not only shatters prevailing myths about supposedly bloated government spending and payrolls. The numbers confirm once again that budget cutters […]

During his 2004 campaign, Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn declared, "I favor the death penalty for abortionists." Four years later, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin famously refused to condemn an abortion clinic bomber as a "terrorist." Last week, a GOP mayoral candidate in Jacksonville joked that bombing an abortion clinic "may cross my mind." Now, […]

"Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong." As it turns out, those 1982 Dire Straits lyrics sum up the current dire straits of the 2012 Republican presidential field. With the premature withdrawal of John Thune and Mike Pence from the ranks of the GOP White House hopefuls, social conservatives are nervously […]