This diatribe bestowed upon Rep. Raul Grijalva on CNBC, which has become Fiscal Cliff TV, is really priceless, with the anchor accusing Grijalva of tanking the market because he refuses to cut benefits for poor people and seniors. The means testing angle is really a joke here, too. Medicare is already means-tested. To means-test it [...]

The White House released to the Washington Postwhat amounts to an opening bid for fiscal slope/grand bargain talks. It turns out that this is actually just what was in the President’s proposed 2013 budget. But since it does add up to $4 trillion over 10 years, and since everyone’s getting serious about negotiations, we can [...]

Dean Baker is right: if we’re going to start making policy out of concern for the legacy we will leave to our children and grandchildren, then you have to address the probability that the planet will grow too warm to sustain life in vast areas of the map. Certainly that counts as an urgent priority [...]

One of the keys to a strategy of letting the fiscal slope elements expire to increase leverage for a reasonable post-slope deal after the fact concerns how the Office of Management and Budget handles the sequester, the automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending. They issued a report back in September, but it wasn’t terribly [...]

The Treasury Department estimates that the US will reach its debt ceiling by the end of this year. However, they still have an array of extraordinary measures that gave them about three months of headroom after hitting the limit in 2011. The Treasury said Wednesday it could take “extraordinary measures” to juggle the nation’s finances [...]

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Pete Peterson-funded front group associated with the Fix the Debt campaign, basically the biggest deficit scolds out there, wrote this piecetrying to differentiate their thirst for austerity from the fiscal cliff, which is an austerity package in and of itself. They claim that it’s important to “go [...]

We’ve been following this issue of states using the hard dollars in the foreclosure fraud settlement – which is only about $2.5 billion, 10% of the total amount – as free money they can use to fill their budget gaps, rather than the notional goal of the settlement, to help homeowners. Some state leaders have [...]

Congress decided to return to work early, or at least one committee did. The House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing at this hour on the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Marcy Wheeler has been bravely live-tweeting the event; I don’t think I could [...]

Here’s a story at the intersection of catastrophic climate change and austerity. Because of the constant burning of carbon into the atmosphere and the resulting changes to the weather and climate, the US has experienced more and more wildfires over the past several years. In fact, this has been the worst wildfire season on record. [...]

The Greek government submitted a draft budget for next year that would only further increase the pain and suffering directed at the population, despite depression conditions. But the European leaders determining whether the fresh austerity plan is good enough to meet their conditions want even more pain, in the form of deeper wage cuts. First, [...]

Though Congress has decided to slink out of Washington early, there is one meeting of some importance going on in Washington this week. The House Ways and Means Committee, the main tax-writing body, will meet in a bipartisan closed session tomorrow to go over the spate of expiring tax measures that hit at the end [...]