As the deadline for the March 1 budget sequester approached, John Boehner made a surprising admission. Asked if he had "a sense of how many jobs will be lost as a result of the sequester," the Speaker of the House said, "I do not." On Sunday, Boehner once again proclaimed his ignorance in an interview […]

History will record that Mitt Romney was a pimple on the ass of American politics: painful while here and forgotten once gone. Now the pustule has resurfaced. As part of his brief "Thank You Tour," Romney is using appearance on Fox News Sunday to attack President Obama for "berating Republicans and blaming and pointing" over […]

Back in 2010, Ohio Rep. John Boehner defied recent history and basic math when he comically denied that the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 played any role in producing federal budget deficits ever since. Now in his refusal to countenance any new tax revenue in a last minute compromise to avoid the […]

Nothing focuses the mind, Oscar Wilde famously said, like the sight of the gallows. And so it is with Republican Governors on the brink of losing $6 billion in federal aid thanks to automatic budget cuts currently set to kick in on March 1. But it shouldn't have taken the specter of the sequester's body […]

Less than two weeks ago, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf warned the House Budget Committee that the looming March 1 sequester would have a devastating impact on U.S. employment. "We think that would reduce the level of employment at the end of the year," Elmendorf cautioned, "by about 750,000 jobs." Apparently, Republican House […]

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is everywhere. This week, the conservative economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office co-authored a widely read--and widely panned--prescription for Republican health care reform. And for months, the President of the American Action Forum has used his perch on The Guardian op-ed page to slam President Obama over the U.S. national […]

No account of how the United States ended up at the brink of the $1.2 trillion, ten-year budget sequester is complete without these two phrases: "debt ceiling hostage-taking" and "Super Committee." Nevertheless, in his grandstanding campaign to lay blame for the automatic spending cuts at President Obama's feet, Watergate journalist turned deficit hawk Bob Woodward […]

As the federal government nears the March 1st deadline to avoid the $1.2 trillion, ten year budget sequester, the media are breathlessly playing the blame game. While House Speaker John Boehner continued to decry "the Obama sequester" in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "the President is raging against a budget crisis he created," John […]

Barring a last minute miracle compromise, on March 1 the first year of the $1.2 trillion, decade-long budget sequester will begin. With few exceptions, that's a development neither party wants to come to pass. For Democrats, the sequester doesn't just mean the potential loss of 750,000 jobs in 2013 alone, but slashing non-defense discretionary spending […]