In his press conference just now, President Obama just said that the fiscal commission has not been shelved, despite the lack of pickup of its ideas in his budget. He said that the fact that it got 11 votes – three less than it needed to move on to Congress – showed it served as [...]

In some of the more detailed comments on Social Security of his entire Presidency, President Obama insisted that Social Security does not have a funding crisis, but that bringing it into long-term actuarial balance would require some “modest adjustments.” He didn’t specify as to the nature of those adjustments. The president acknowledged at a small [...]

Today, a coalition of 50 organizations dedicated to ensuring no benefit cuts to Social Security launched in Washington. The coalition, including top labor unions, progressive groups like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, and a host of others, released seven principles that will guide their policy prescriptions: 1) Social Security did not cause the federal deficit; [...]

Members of the cat food commission have consistently said that they will put a priority on spending cuts with their recommendations for deficit reduction. Co-Chair of the commission Erskine Bowles has, in fact, made a long-term spending target of 21% of GDP. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has written a report on this [...]

Some House Democrats have tried to use John Boehner’s comments about raising the retirement age against Republicans in the fall elections, but that becomes impossible to do when Steny Hoyer keeps going out and undermining the effort by mimicking Boehner. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer reiterated Tuesday that raising the retirement age for Social Security [...]

The LA Times reported today that liberal members of Congress on Capitol Hill are personally unhappy with President Obama. Mostly the story included gripes and personal slights and a general tenor that they have been asked to bend and bend and bend, with their counterparts in the Blue Dog caucus getting every concession for which [...]

The CBO definitely put their thumb on the scale with their long-term budget analysis yesterday. They admitted that, under current law, there would be very little long-term budget problems, but under an invented “alternative” scenario, where Congress spends more and taxes less, we’d have trouble. Some of those alternatives were accurate (the Congress will never [...]

Let me update my story about the push by labor and Democratic politicos to highlight John Boehner’s Social Security comments and offer an alternative to the deficit hysteria. Trumka’s entire speech is now available, and you can see he doesn’t mince words at all. First on the recent past: We should be honest about what’s [...]