This really ups the ante on a fight that has been simmering ever since the House GOP made the decision to renege on the debt limit deal: In a major escalation of a slowly building fight over funding the government, the White House has warned House Republicans, in no uncertain terms, that the government will [...]

Reading about this, I’m reminded of that old liberal bumper sticker about how “it will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” In Miami County, Kansas, they had to hold the equivalent of a bake sale to [...]

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 [...]

Mark Zandi now predicts that the job market will come back at a much stronger clip than he previously expected, with the jobless rate under 8% by the end of 2012 and under 7% by the end of 2013. Zandi is the guy who predicted a bottom in housing prices in 2008, 2009, 2010 and [...]

Get ready for another round of whining from Paul Ryan when the President attacks his radical budget at a speech for newspaper executives today (starting at 12:30pm ET). In an election-year pitch to middle-class voters, President Barack Obama is denouncing a House Republican budget plan as a “Trojan horse,” warning that it represents “an attempt [...]

Robert Kuttner kicks off a discussion that progressives are going to have to hold among themselves between now and the upcoming lame duck session. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s addressing it in a realistic way. Kuttner points out the trio of major fiscal changes that will hit at the end of the year if Congress [...]

The House vote on the budget will not just include an up-or-down vote on the Paul Ryan version. As per custom, several budgets will get a vote that day. The Republican Study Group introduced their budget, which slashed spending even further and more quickly than Ryan’s and cut Medicaid more deeply, today. Hardline conservatives who [...]

As long as the news media devotes massive amounts of space to a fantasy budget, why can’t they turn their attention for just a minute to a more legitimate one? Sure, the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Budget for All isn’t likely to get much more than the 100 or so votes of its members, short of [...]

This will probably be my last post on the Paul Ryan budget, which you can access here. It’s simply not worth wasting that much space on a budget plan that not only won’t become law, but may not even pass the House. Conservatives are angry that it doesn’t cut enough, and takes too long (beyond [...]

The Ryan budget has appeared as a chairman’s mark. It’s a long document written in Congress-ese, but I’ve already gone over some of the main points. Here are a couple other tidbits: • The coverage of the trigger cuts for 2013, incorporated into this document, are unformed and will be the work of six committees. [...]

Paul Ryan’s budget was released this morning. He kicked it off with another pretentious video preview and a somewhat less pretentious and more standard op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Ryan’s budget resolution is similar to last year’s version, which passed the House and went nowhere in the Senate. The charges are similar, too. He [...]