Mitch McConnell laid out his wish list for the endgame in the fiscal slope negotiations, and it’s basically the kinds of social insurance benefit cuts that the White House offered up in 2011 (which is again a reminder why you don’t offer those up as a bluff, because they will come back to haunt you), [...]

The word “cliff” does a lot of work here. If there is a drop-dead date, a point of no return where the unwinding of the damage would be too great, then the sense of urgency generated by the Gang of Eight would make more sense. But it actually doesn’t work that way. The economy won’t fall off a cliff, but amble down a slope, in a way that allows for much more deliberative conversation about the best practices for the economy today, not just in the future.

Lori Montgomery’s story on yesterday’s tax extenders vote in the Senate Finance Committee is kind of aggressively stupid, the kind of story that uses funny-sounding tax breaks as the basis for an anti-Congress pose. In reality those funny-sounding tax breaks amount to a rounding error in the overall budget. Most of the tax extender package, [...]

In the coming days, the House will pass a tax bill that would extend the Bush tax cuts entirely for one year. This stands in slight contrast to a Senate-passed bill that extends the same tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income. But what I didn’t realize is that the House bill will also [...]

One problem with talking about the “Bush tax cuts” is that they incorporate much more than just the individual income tax marginal rates. Among other things, you have the changes to the estate tax. And so today, House Democrats plan to introduce an estate tax measure that would freeze the tax at 2009 levels. In [...]

Do Democrats have a plan for dealing with the fiscal “cliff”?  Based on interviews I conducted at Netroots Nation with four members of the Senate Democratic caucus — Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Ben Cardin, Jeff Merkley and Sherrod Brown –  it seems they have far more than one. The end-of-the-year fiscal measures, totaling up to $7 [...]

The President held another Buffett rule event today in Washington, featuring a series of millionaires and their secretaries. The people who have joined me here today are extremely successful. They’ve created jobs and opportunity for thousands of Americans. They’re rightly proud of their success. They love the country that made their success possible, and most [...]

It’s certainly against type to see a Democratic Presidential campaign running on taxes. In particular, raising taxes on a certain subset of the population. But as they search for an articulated agenda, the Obama campaign has latched on to the Buffett rule, the alternative minimum tax for millionaires, as a key campaign plank. I noted [...]

With a Jewish holiday coming up tonight thoughts turn to what I should be neurotic about. Matt Yglesias says I should freak out about Europe, and he’s right. But that’s been the case for two years. And the powers that be over there are religiously opposed to the proper steps to take to end the [...]

I don’t know if anything’s going to get done in Congress in 2012, but one thing is becoming clear – Senate Democrats will try to put Republicans up against the wall on taxes. They already have on the record multiple instances of Republicans voting almost in unison against millionaire’s surtaxes. Now we’ll see votes on [...]

I’m getting a little tired of these retrospectives of the Administration’s actions to deal with the economic crisis in 2009-2010, but Ryan Lizza has a new one in the New Yorker, and I wanted to pull out a few key points. First of all, let’s recognize that the narrator is sometimes unreliable. Lizza, after a [...]