Until Republicans captured their House majority in January 2011, no political party ever had both the intent and the votes to block an increase in the U.S. debt ceiling. While figures in both parties have cast symbolic votes against raising Uncle Sam's borrowing authority (Senator Barack Obama among them), until 2011 neither Democrats nor Republicans […]

On January 7, 200--two weeks before Barack Obama took the oath of office--the Congressional Budget Office forecast the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 at $1.2 trillion. Now, the CBO is projecting the deficit will be only $642 billion for FY 2013, $200 billion less than the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper estimated as recently as […]

Two years ago, Congressional Republicans took the unprecedented step of holding the debt ceiling hostage in order to extract draconian spending cuts. Now, the GOP's willingness to sabotage the American (and global) economy may be about to take an even more dangerous--and obscene--turn. House Republicans are suggesting they will not support an increase in the […]

"It's never been easy for House Republicans to raise the debt limit." With that opening sentence, Jake Sherman and Steven Sloan of Politico provided air cover for the GOP's unprecedented--and dangerously irresponsible--debt ceiling hostage-taking. After all, Republicans in both houses of Congress had no problem raising the debt limit until Democrat Barack Obama became President. […]

Almost everything you need to know about the self-destructive economic policy coming out of Congress was contained in two simple statements this week. While the Federal Reserve warned that "fiscal policy is restraining economic growth," the Republican National Committee released an ad crowing that "the sequester is here to stay." Judging by the April jobs […]

If you had any doubts that Republicans believe in government stimulus spending to create jobs, look no further than the Pentagon budget. Two years after House Speaker John Boehner sought $450 million in funding for a second F-35 jet engine that the Defense Secretary and Presidents Bush and Obama opposed, Ohio Senator Rob Portman and […]

Friday's news that U.S. gross domestic product grew by only 2.5 percent came as a disappointment. After all, that performance not only fell short of the consensus expectation of three percent GDP growth, but was aided by a one-time bump for inventory expansion deferred from the last quarter of 2012. And while the strengthening housing […]

Thanks to graduate student Thomas Herndon, economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart are now the stuff of pop culture legend. (Even Stephen Colbert is getting in on the act.) But the epic failure of their Excel spreadsheets is no laughing matter. In the United States and across Europe, austerity advocates have seized on their dubious […]

The United States may have serious longer-term fiscal problems, but Social Security is not chief among them. After all, the Social Security Trust Fund has a $2.7 trillion surplus and will continue to grow until 2021. Even though the population of Americans over 65 will grow by a third over the next decade, by 2035 […]

Despite slashing the national debt by an additional $1.8 trillion over the next decade, President Obama's proposed fiscal year 2014 budget was received with two predictable talking points by Republican leaders. House Majority Eric Cantor, who previously complained about being called a "hostage taker," protested that "we ought to do so without holding [entitlement cuts] […]