We’re still in the posturing phase of the fiscal cliff situation, and now we have another data point. Harry Reid has come out and said pretty forcefully that he will not roll back the trigger, the automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending due at the end of the year, without a “balanced” approach to [...]

My reporter hat was squarely off during my two-week stay in Spain. But you cannot spend time in a country at the heart of the global discussion without picking up some signals. Over those two weeks, the Spanish government definitively announced that they had slipped back into recession. They said that 5.6 million of their [...]

Francois Hollande’s victory in the French Presidential election, which may actually mean less for policy in France than meets the eye – in the end, you’re talking about center-left versus center-right – nonetheless has significant repercussions for Europe and the rest of the world.  This is one of the only countries Germany needs to at [...]

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has won the French Presidential election, defeating incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, yet another political victim of the Eurozone crisis. After the early exit polls showed a 52-48 victory for Hollande, Sarkozy conceded defeat and called Hollande to wish him luck running the country. Hollande had won the first round of the elections [...]

Steve Randy Waldman had a much remarked-upon piece about how policymakers choose to have recessions and depressions, because they have been captured by an elite rentier class. It becomes much easier to understand the decisions made in government with this perspective. We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy [...]

In 2007, Democrats passed an increase in the minimum wage, and got George W. Bush to sign it by making it the scraps exchanged for more war funding. In the 2008 campaign, most of the Democratic candidates, including the eventual winner, expressed support for indexing the minimum wage to inflation, so it maintained its value [...]

In what at first glance looks like a major concession, ALEC, the embattled right-wing legislation factory for state and local government, announced they would refocus their efforts solely on economic issues.  The claim they’ll eliminate a task force they had devoted to social and cultural issues, like guns and voter ID laws and abortion. Here’s [...]

Form held today, as the US choice for President of the World Bank was formally adopted as the new leader. In a vote of member states, Dr. Jim Yong Kim won election to the Presidency, beating out his chief rival, Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank managing director. Dr. Kim, 52, will take over [...]

An unusually blunt ruling from two conservative federal judges, if applied at the Supreme Court level, would make virtually all regulation on businesses or financial firms unconstitutional. DC Circuit Court members David Sentelle (a Reagan appointee) and Janice Rogers Brown (an appointee of George W. Bush) wrote a concurring opinion in a case about regulation [...]

I probably should have warned you before posting that video of George W. Bush, speaking today at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. His remarks came in conjunction with a conference called “Tax Policies For 4% Growth,” put together by such luminaries as James Glassman, the guy who wrote “Dow 36,000.” I don’t have strong [...]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is far more admired by national Republicans wanting a tough guy to yell at liberals than by his own constituents in his state. And a new report goes a long way to explaining why. Because Christie is the latest in a long line of conservative liars who will tailor their [...]