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 […]

Last month, an analysis by Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez revealed that the top 1 percent of American earners captured all the income gains during the first two years of the current economic recovery while the other 99 percent lost ground. Now, a new analysis by Congressional Research Service analyst Thomas Hungerford is just the latest […]

Back in 2009, the American media offered a series of stories on the recession's impact on the tragically rich. The New York Times, CBS News, AP and even PBS toured yachts, vineyards and beach resorts (even profiling soon-to-be fugitive millionaire John McAfee) to warn that the super-rich "are not sleeping any better than the rest […]

All along, the real danger of the so-called "fiscal cliff" wasn't that U.S. national debt would increase, but instead that it would drop too quickly. Now, the surprise news that the American economy contracted by 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012 is providing a case in point. Along with the impact of super […]

One day after New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described Republican brinksmanship on the debt ceiling as "hostage-taking," President Obama used his Monday press conference declared, "They will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy." But you don't have to take their word for it that […]

If you have lingering doubts that economic growth--and not deficit reduction--should be the highest priority during the debate over the so-called "fiscal cliff," the Congressional Budget Office should put them to rest. The CBO forecast that the triple witching hour of expiring Bush tax cuts, the ending payroll tax holiday and the falling axe of […]

Much to the delight of President Obama's conservative naysayers, Politico this morning reported that "the Treasury Department on Wednesday announced plans to sell, almost certainly at a loss, the government's remaining shares of Detroit-based automaker General Motors." Predictably, the right-wing Washington Free Beacon darkly warned "Treasury prepares to lose big on GM bailout" while gloating […]

If an enemy declared war on the American economy, the United States would spare no effort to remove that threat to its prosperity and national security. So it was with Osama Bin Laden, who in 2004 described his goal as "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." And as it turns out, by 2020 Uncle […]

For the second time in as many weeks, an analysis by a nonpartisan agency of Congress has demolished the GOP myth of upper-income taxes and so-called "job creators." Just days before voters headed to the polls, the Congressional Research Service documented that for decades tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were not correlated to economic […]