Rolling out his plan to cut the national debt last week, Mitt Romney promised to "align federal employee compensation with the public sector." If so, the roughly 2.8 million federal workers whose pay has been frozen by President Obama can expect a big raise from President Romney. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, […]

As polling and media analyses revealed earlier this year, Republicans used the 2010 midterm campaign to completely turn the focus in Washington from job creation to deficit reduction. But now that the Occupy Wall Street movement is well into its second month, the GOP is changing its tune. We know this not only from recent […]

House Budget Committee chairman and supposed GOP wunderkind Paul Ryan chose the wrong the week to attack President Obama for "sowing social unrest and class resentment." After all, just one day earlier the CBO confirmed that income inequality in the U.S. is at highest level in 80 years, a yawning gap certain to be enlarged […]

This week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provided just the latest analysis confirming that U.S. income inequality is at record levels. But while the income gap is at largest in 80 years even as the total federal tax burden is at its smallest in 60, the 2012 Republican presidential field is proposing to make both […]

Back in August, Americans learned that among Rick Perry's miserable grades in college was a "D" in "Principles of Economics." Now we know why. His contribution to the GOP's flat tax one-upsmanship not only fails to simply the U.S. tax code. As it turns out, Governor Perry's "Cut, Balance and Grow" scheme would undermine Social […]

During the debate over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in early 2009, stimulus opponent Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed, "If the money were lent rather than just granted, states would, I think, spend it wisely and the states that didn't need it at all wouldn't take any." Now would be a […]

Here's a handy cheat sheet for those trying to make sense of the protest movements of the past three years. Tea Party followers were mad about losing the 2008 election; Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are angry about losing the American Dream. But for defenders of the Tea Party, that unhappy band of especially ardent Republicans, […]

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner took Barack Obama to task for the President's claim that he had not yet seen a jobs plan from Republicans. "I want to make sure," Boehner lectured the President, "you have all the facts." As it turns out, this is one of those rare occasions where John Boehner is […]

These are tough times for Ronald Reagan's heirs, or at least some of them. After a generation of disastrous supply-side tax cuts helped produce mountains of debt, plummeting upper-income tax rates a decades-low federal tax burden and record income inequality, thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide are finally drawing attention to the plight of […]

In their never-ending attempts to prevent upper-income tax increases at all costs, Republicans have bemoaned the mythical impacts on small business owners and supposed "job creators." But in pointing out that the Democrats' proposed millionaires' tax to fund the American Jobs Act would disproportionately hit the gilded-class in Blue State America, the right-wing's latest gambit […]