From the very beginning of the debate over health care reform, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has delivered the same two messages to Congressional lawmakers. First, over a 10-year time frame, the Affordable Care Act--aka Obamacare--reduces the national debt. Conversely, the CBO has always found, repealing "every word" of Obamacare will necessarily increase the […]

This was a very big week for American billionaires in the news. On Tuesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan marked the occasion of their daughter's birth to announce that "during their lives" they will donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charitable purposes. But just one day after we […]

This week's GOP presidential debate was notable both for what the candidates said and for what they didn't say. Noting that Presidents Obama and Clinton had added 107,000 and 240,000 jobs a month compared to George W. Bush's anemic 13,000, Fox Business moderator Maria Bartiromo asked Carly Fiorino, "How are you going to respond to […]

During Wednesday's GOP debate on the economy hosted by CNBC, Ohio Governor John Kasich offered a rare moment of truth. Referring to his Republican rivals' tax plans as "fantasy," Kasich mocked the notion that any of them had a prayer of reducing the national debt, let alone balancing the federal budget: "You can't do it […]

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned that the federal government will run out of cash on November unless Congress raises the debt ceiling to increase Uncle Sam's borrowing authority. Under pressure from hard liners in his own party, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is returning to his role as hostage-taker, threatening to block the […]

Former neurosurgeon-turned-2016 GOP White House hopeful Ben Carson raised some eyebrows last week with his declaration that gun control enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler and the annihilation of European Jewry in the Holocaust. But no one who has followed "the biggest fan of Nazi metaphors in politics" should have been surprised by Carson's grotesque […]

Of all of the myths Republicans have generated for American voters, the fiction that "tax cuts pay for themselves" is the Uber Lie. After all, almost four decades of U.S history and a mountain of incontrovertible evidence show the only certain outcomes of GOP tax-cutting plans are skyrocketing national debt and ever-widening income inequality. It's […]

On Monday, Donald Trump became just the latest Republican White House hopeful to propose a Treasury draining, tax cut windfall for the richest Americans. But while Trump calls for slashing the top marginal income tax rates at a time of record income inequality, a new study from the Brookings Institution argues that hiking those same […]

Some things never change. With some constants in life, like the invariable force of gravity or the sun rising in the east, that persistence is good news. (Imagine your morning coffee without them.) The bad news is that some myths, no matter how dangerous or thoroughly debunked, never seem to die. This week, the greatest […]

While all eyes have been focused on the worldwide stock market plunge, a recent survey of economists by the Wall Street Journal identified a different threat to the vitality of the U.S. economy. But it's not the instability of Chinese stock prices, the devaluation of its currency, the Eurozone's Greek tragedy or even a premature […]