"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously lamented to President Bush in 2006, "has a well-known liberal bias." It is conservatives' perpetual fear that the truth will not set them free that is the driving force behind two House Republican proposals announced this week. For starters, Lamar Smith (R-TX), the GOP chairman of the House Science, Space and […]

At the very start of his political career back in the 1970's, Montana Senator Max Baucus asked New Deal veteran James Rowe Jr., "Do you think I should run as a Republican or a Democrat?" Rowe's uneasy answer--"I sure hope you'll be a Democrat"--has defined Baucus' career ever since. After all, he voted for the […]

On the federal budget as with so much else, Republicans won't take yes as an answer from President Obama. On Friday, the White House rolled out its fiscal year 2014 budget proposal cutting projected deficits by $1.8 trillion in part by adopting the means testing of Medicare benefits and the "chained CPI" to slow the […]

The Obama administration on Friday lifted the covers on its compromise budget proposal for fiscal year 2014. But despite slashing the national debt by a projected $1.8 trillion over the next decade (bringing the total reductions since 2011 to $4.3 trillion) through painful changes to Social Security and Medicare, Republicans are predictably balking at Obama's […]

If there is one area where the White House and Congressional Republicans are in some agreement, it concerns corporate tax reform. President Obama has proposed slashing the statutory rate from 35 to 28 percent while recouping lost revenue through the elimination of corporate tax breaks costing the Treasury tens of billions of dollars each year. […]

Perhaps the greatest myth in the Republican pantheon is the claim that "tax cuts pay for themselves." Sadly, that article of supply-side faith--that tax cuts fuel economic growth so explosive that federal revenue exceeds what otherwise would have been collected--has been painfully debunked by decades of history. Unfortunately, as part of budget deal just completed […]

America's soul-searching to mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq went pretty much according to script. While many of its liberal supporters offered their mea culpas for having been so catastrophically mistaken, the Bush administration's architects of the war doubled-down on their epic failure. (Meanwhile, some of their biggest cheerleaders lamented only […]

Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann marked the third anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act by urging her colleagues to repeal Obamacare "before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens." Of course, as the likes of Rep. Virginia Foxx (who similarly declared the ACA would "put seniors in a position of being […]

This week, House Speaker John Boehner and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan made two important if largely overlooked admissions regarding the U.S. national debt. While Boehner told ABC News that "we have no immediate debt crisis," Ryan similarly acknowledged to CBS News, "We do not have a debt crisis right now." That is indisputably […]

This week, former GOP vice presidential nominee and current House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will present the 2013 Republican budget proposal. Unlike his last plan which didn't balance the budget until 2038, this time Ryan insists he will hit break even in just 10 ten years. As Ezra Klein explained, Ryan will close much […]