Peter Orszag caused a bit of a stir with his call for an enlightened technocracy, and, literally, “less democracy.” I think what you actually need out of government is “more democracy,” if you equate democracy with majority rule and the ability for an elected government to get the agenda on which they ran into law. [...]

Greg Sargent tries to explain why there’s so much anger around liberals over the impending tax cut cave. Much of the debate about the left and Obama tends to focus on Obama’s ideological tendencies — on the question of whether he’s too quick to trade away core liberal priorities because he’s at bottom not ideologically [...]

Peter Orszag writes about the Bowles-Simpson recommendations on Social Security, and generally finds them amenable. I don’t know why this should come as a surprise – they basically take a similar form as his Diamond-Orszag recommendations, with a mixture of benefit cuts and payroll tax increases to arrive at long-term solvency. Orszag rightly notes that [...]

The deficit commission comes out with their recommendations on December 1; I would expect President Obama to embrace them. Stuck deep inside Evan Bayh’s encomium to tepid oatmeal was a tell on this issue. The most important area for spending restraint is entitlement reform. Democrats should offer changes to the system that would save hundreds [...]

Greg Sargent thinks that the rift between Peter Orszag and Barack Obama on the Bush tax cuts is overblown: “The point I was trying to make is that we can’t afford the tax cuts over the medium term, and they shouldn’t be made permanent — but the middle class tax cuts should not expire today,” [...]

Democrats have been beaten down as long as they can remember by the ghosts of bond markets past, which prove inevitably to constrain the ability to advance a progressive agenda through any kind of federal spending. However, this time around, the bond market is basically putting the country in an ideal position to spend more, [...]

Peter Orszag has moved from the White House to a contributing columnist position with the New York Times. And in his first effort, he addresses the Bush tax cuts, coming to a conclusion far removed from the standard position at the White House. The President wants to extend all the tax cuts for those making [...]

Jack Lew, a former OMB Director in the Clinton Administration and currently a top deputy to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, has been nominated by the President moments ago to replace Peter Orszag as the current OMB Director. Lew served as OMB Director from 1998 to 2001. Here’s President Obama’s statement: “The experience and [...]

In an announcement that portends misery for much of the world’s citizens (and I’m only slightly exaggerating), the G20 communique will include a pledge from the largest nations on Earth to halve their budget deficits by 2013. Coming at a fragile time for the global economy, this descent into austerity could lead to a return [...]

The New York Times cites an anonymous source saying that Peter Orszag will step down as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Orszag, an economist who previously spent nearly two years as director of the Congressional Budget Office, somewhat reluctantly accepted Mr. Obama’s invitation to join the Cabinet after the 2008 [...]

Late yesterday afternoon, Congressional leaders and the White House struck a deal that would create a process to end the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on gay servicemembers. Under the framework of the deal, Congress would repeal the policy but delay implementation until after the Dec. 1 release of a Pentagon study on how [...]