The Senate on Tuesday morning voted 60-37 to advance a bill extending long-term unemployment benefits for three months. Despite the support from six Republican Senators, its fate in both Houses is still uncertain. To secure final passage, Susan Collins (R-ME) told President Obama he'd have to "help us find an offset" for the $6.4 billion […]

On January 1, 2014, the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect. But for all of the furious fighting over the law these past five years, Obamacare was always an evolutionary reform grafted onto the existing American health care system. The Medicaid public insurance program has been extended to roughly four million lower income Americans […]

On Monday, the federal government announced it had sold off the remaining shares from its $49.5 billion bailout of General Motors in 2009. But the $10.5 billion loss on paper obscures the massive total return on investment for the U.S. economy overall and American taxpayers in particular. As a new analysis from the Center for […]

Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. So it would seem with the reaction of American conservatives to Evangelii Gaudium, the new 85-page apostolic exhortation issued by Pope Francis. Just days after Sarah Palin fretted that some of the Pope's statements "sound kind of liberal," Rush […]

Six years after the start of the Great Recession, there should be little disagreement what America's number one domestic priority should be. With unemployment still stuck around 7 percent four plus years after that recession was declared "over," creating jobs has to be Job #1. That urgency is underscored by the new analyses warning that […]

During his short time in the Holy See, Pope Francis has had two clear messages for his faithful in the United States. Decrying those who "seek selfish profit," Francis in May pleaded with "those in public office to make every effort to give new impetus to employment." And just last month, the Bishop of Rome […]

These are heady days for red state propagandists. After years of leading the nation in poverty, low incomes, poor working conditions, dismal educational performance, awful health care systems, shocking teen birth rates, sky-high divorce rates, bloody gun violence and just about every other measure of social dysfunction, Republican-dominated states finally have some good news to […]

In recent week, a growing consensus of economists, analysts and political leaders has called for an end to U.S. fiscal austerity. Even as the influential Reinhart-Rogoff high-debt/low-growth thesis was being shredded, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) slashed its FY 2013 deficit forecast by $200 billion while Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress that failure to […]

Almost everything you need to know about the self-destructive economic policy coming out of Congress was contained in two simple statements this week. While the Federal Reserve warned that "fiscal policy is restraining economic growth," the Republican National Committee released an ad crowing that "the sequester is here to stay." Judging by the April jobs […]

"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 […]