Imagine that you are completing your federal tax return. After looking up the tax rate for your income level, you decide you will pay 20 percent less to Uncle Sam. But along with your underpayment, you include a handwritten note to the IRS letting the government know that you promise to make up the difference […]

This week, Rex Nutting of the MarketWatch caused a stir with his analysis correctly showing that federal spending has hardly budged under President Obama, rising at the slowest pace since the Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. Predictably, James Pethokoukis of the conservative American Enterprise Institute cited the jump in Washington's spending as a […]

In the wake of the debt ceiling crisis he helped manufacture last summer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell boasted it was "a hostage that's worth ransoming" which "also is a new template" for the future. As it turns out, those threats were among the few true words McConnell has uttered. Because while he's promising once […]

"When the president told me yesterday that he wanted a clean increase in the debt limit," House Speaker John Boehner said this week, "It almost took my breath away." It shouldn't have. After all, Congress raised the debt ceiling 17 times under Ronald Reagan and seven more under George W. Bush, including a "clean" increase […]

Now for a thought experiment. Suppose that I told you I had a plan which over the next decade would slash $6 trillion from the national debt of the United States. Imagine further that I promised I would achieve those savings just by closing some tax loopholes and deductions, so-called tax expenditures that all told […]

With its general election opponent now certain, the Obama campaign this week has been highlighting the Buffett Rule, the Democratic proposal for those earning over a million dollars a year to pay a minimum 30 percent tax. And with good reason. After all, having paid only 13.9 percent to Uncle Sam on $45 million in […]

Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has become the perfect Republican Easter story. Each spring, Ryan reemerges with a new version of his draconian "Roadmap for America's Future." Despite being crucified each time by most Democrats, much of the press and even some members of his own party, Ryan nevertheless rises again, earning more followers (like Mitt […]

In the wake of Mitt Romney's solid victory in Illinois, conservative columnist Fred Barnes proposed a Romney-Ryan ticket for the fall. That would be altogether fitting. After all, Romney didn't merely endorse the catastrophic GOP budget plan Paul Ryan unveiled Tuesday; he already laid out an almost identical blueprint. Stylistically, both Ryan the budget chairman […]

If the new House GOP budget unveiled Tuesday by Paul Ryan sounds familiar, it should. And not just because Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" is essentially the same scheme he's been pushing for two years. As it turns out, Mitt Romney is offering the same disastrous recipe for America's future. Both Ryan and Romney would deliver […]

You can fool some of the people all the time, and that's our target market. On no issue has that time-tested Republican strategy been more consistently applied than the impact of tax cuts on the national debt. But even after oceans of red ink washed away George W. Bush's bogus contention that "You cut taxes, […]