The Super Committee continues to meet and pretend like they’re going to come up with an end product in three weeks. We’ve learned a bit more about the Republican offer. We know that the Democrats’ plan was no great shakes, but needless to say, the Republican plan is worse, particularly in the area of revenues. [...]

Brian Beutler notices that the “taxes on the rich” that President Obama’s Administration suggested yesterday to pay for the American Jobs Act weren’t really taxes on the rich, but a tax trigger that would only set off if the Super Committee didn’t come up with $450 billion to pay for the job measures in the [...]

Greg Sargent has more of the story about Tom Coburn’s unceremonious exit from the Gang of Six. We pretty much knew it had to do with Coburn seeking a global spending cap for Medicare. We didn’t know the details: The “Gang of Six” talks on deficit reduction broke down after Senators Dick Durbin and Tom [...]

Ezra Klein has helpfully assembled a summary of the Ryan GOP budget. As you can see, while everyone’s talking about the privatization of Medicare and block-grant of Medicaid, there are plenty of other pieces worth discussing here even without any of that. Ryan would reduce discretionary spending to pre-2008 levels and freeze it for five [...]

We already knew plenty about Warner-Chambliss, the move by two Senators to revive the cat food commission and push through the Bowles-Simpson report. Bowles and Simpson are giving them a hand with that with something called the “Moment of Truth Project,” in conjunction with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Pete Peterson outfit [...]

The Catfood Commission will hold its final vote today on basically what Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson put together a couple weeks ago, and they’re going to get 10 votes for it. Andy Stern, who introduced his own plan, became the deciding vote against the report, which needed 14 votes to become official, saying it [...]

There was a very curious bit in yesterday’s press conference with Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, where Simpson claimed that Harry Reid promised a vote on the recommendations that will come out today in the next Congress. I did some digging on that, and Reid has made that promise, but with two conditions: the commission [...]

For most of the week, you could see the wheels coming off of the Catfood Commission. First we heard that “they may surprise us,” but then there was this moving of the goalposts. Despite the fact that 14 of the 18 panel members had to agree to secure any recommendations which would go to Congress [...]

On Wednesday, the Catfood Commission is scheduled to deliver the results of their recommendations to Congress on the deficit. Since the early release of the co-chair’s mark, the Bowles-Simpson recommendations, the pair have scaled back their plan to attract votes. The chairmen of the White House’s debt-reduction commission are making last-minute changes to their provocative [...]

The latest leak out of the Catfood Commission is that the participants just can’t seem to agree on anything, with just 11 days to go until their report is due. The bipartisan commission examining how to cut the federal debt ended three days of closed-door meetings Thursday without a firm agreement among its 18 members, [...]

The purpose of raising the retirement age, we’re told, is to increase cat food sales save money and put Social Security on a path to long-term solvency. But the bean-counting geniuses Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson didn’t take one thing into account: it could actually cost more to the system if people go on disability [...]