"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously explained to President George W. Bush, "has a well-known liberal bias." And for Republicans, reality bites most when it comes to tax cuts. After all, for over 30 years, tax cuts have been the GOP's one and only prescription for both economic booms and busts, recessionary slowdowns and budget surpluses, and […]

After months of their much-hyped but still unproven charges of partisan skullduggery at the Internal Revenue Service, House Republicans this week took an axe to the IRS budget. The cost of the GOP vendetta is massive. Cutting the agency's funding for the fifth consecutive year, the House in a 228-to-195 vote slashed the overall IRS […]

And now for today's quiz: When is $10 billion greater than $310 billion? When Republicans control the House of Representatives. Yes, the American people got another lesson in GOP math this week when House Republicans refused to budge on a $10 billion, five-month extension of unemployment benefits for 1.3 million long-term jobless workers while the […]

For over 30 years, it has been the Republican Party's uber lie. Ever since Jude Wanniski first sketched Arthur Laffer's curve on the back of a napkin, conservatives have claimed that "tax cuts pay for themselves" because the extra economic activity they incentivize will produce tax revenues at least as great as they otherwise would […]

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is facing a crisis, just not the one many pundits and most conservatives think. To be sure, the Republican excavation project to unearth the smoking gun proving the agency targeted right-wing "social welfare organizations" over their non-profit status will continue. As Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus described his party's […]

Stung by the blowback from his denunciation of the "tailspin of culture in our inner cities" bred by "generations of men not even thinking about working," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) took to Fox News last week to declare, "I don't have a racist bone in my body." But the GOP's 2012 vice presidential pick needn't […]

And now a few words of advice to Paul Ryan: for your own sake if not ours, stop unveiling your House Republican budget proposals on April Fool's Day. It only draws attention to the fact that from top to bottom, your supposed "Path to Prosperity" is a joke. Here are just some of the reasons […]

Word that Speaker John Boehner will bring a "clean" debt ceiling bill up for a vote in the House On Tuesday brought a sigh of relief to Washington and global financial markets. After all, a U.S. default arising from a refusal to pay the bills Uncle Sam has already incurred would have meant, as Boehner […]

Despite their trumpeting of its latest budget report, it's no secret that Republicans hate the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) denounced the CBO's forecast that the Affordable Care Act will reduce--not increase--the U.S. national debt, calling its projections "budget gimmickry." That November, momentary GOP presidential frontrunner Newt […]

Days after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its latest projections House Republicans on Friday announced their latest ransom demand for raising the debt ceiling. John Boehner's minions will vote to avoid a U.S. default and a global economic calamity if the Medicare "doc" fix is patched for nine months and cuts to veterans' […]