It’s the law: The House of Representatives voted Tuesday night to approve a Senate bill to avert a feared fiscal cliff. The measure that sought to maintain tax cuts for most Americans but increase rates on the wealthy passed the Democratic-led Senate overwhelmingly early in the day… The legislation would raise roughly $600 billion in [...]

Trying to deflect from Mitt Romney’s comments on those dastardly parasites who make up 47% of America, conservatives have trotted out an “exclusive” secret tape from 1998 with then State Senator Barack Obama making utterly banal mainstream Democratic comments about redistribution: And my suggestion, I guess, would be that the trick—and this is one of [...]

The political world has found the latest pull-quote to obsess over today. In an interview with ABC, MItt Romney claimed that middle-income Americans make up to $250,000 a year. This has spawned the usual chuckles and claims of being out of touch. And it’s true that it’s hard to swallow all this concern for those [...]

Most political speeches are pitched directly at the broad segment of the population that considers themselves middle class. The speeches over the last two weeks at the RNC and DNC have broadly fit along these lines, with the glaring and important exception of Bill Clinton talking cogently about Medicaid, a huge fault line in this [...]

It’s hard not to get blinded by the searing light of Bill Clinton. But Elizabeth Warren gave the speech that spoke more to me last night. Strip away the reason all these speeches are happening – support for the President – and the stories that Warren and Clinton told were a little different. Clinton told [...]

The great middle class, the group lauded in campaign ads by every politician in the country, is wasting away according to a Pew study. Using the broadest possible figures (between 67% and 200% of the national median income), the study shows that the middle class has declined to a bare majority of the population. Furthermore, [...]

The Senate staff of the Joint Economic Committee, led by Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), has put out a new report on the House Republican budget resolution, specifically their tax reform plans, which lowers the top marginal rate to 25%. Casey’s report shows that the tax cuts in the plan would fall entirely on the wealthiest [...]

I agree with Marcy Wheeler that Netroots Nation 2011 consisted in many ways of a “desperate conversation to save the middle class.” I don’t think anybody figured this out. But some members of the coalition kicked off some important test campaigns. I went to the old Wesley Church in Minneapolis on Saturday, to the premiere [...]

MINNEAPOLIS – Sen. Al Franken will give a speech tomorrow at Netroots Nation about the need for progressive infrastructure as a firewall to protect the middle class. In this excerpt from tomorrow’s speech, he is unsparing in even subtly questioning the patriotism of those who would threaten the survival of the middle class: Medicare, and [...]

The most important kickoff in Democratic and progressive politics today is not Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign. It’s the We Are One April 4 rallies. They’ve been put together by a similar coalition as the One Nation rallies from last October. But in the meantime, the push from right-wing governors across the country to bust unions [...]

By now, I think we understand that the standoff in Wisconsin is not about a budget. There’s no correlation between budget deficits and union membership, and on fiscal matters the unions have generally agreed to various concessions on their pension and health care benefits. No this standoff, and the subsequent ones in Indiana and Ohio [...]