Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to go before Congress today and defend the $614 billion proposed budget for the military in the coming fiscal year. Not because that’s a staggering amount, especially with spending caps all over the government. Because it’s too small for [...]

The White House has told Congressional Republicans they only have one avenue to avoid the defense trigger that would cut the military budget by around $600 billion over the next ten years: they would have to increase revenue by a similar amount. In light of Congressional Republicans’ abandonment of a key part of the debt [...]

Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of [...]

The President made some brief remarks at the Pentagon during the introduction of the new “austerity” defense budget. He stressed that the US will still have the most powerful fighting force in the world, that even after the cuts the defense budget would grow over the next five years, and that the overall budget will [...]

Before embarking on this list of the major issues to expect next year, in the interest of assessing my punditry let’s take a look at my list from last year looking ahead to 2011. I didn’t know what “Occupy Wall Street” or the Arab spring was at that time, nor did I predict the Wisconsin [...]

With the passage of the payroll tax/UI stopgap, that basically closes the books on 2011 from a legislative standpoint. And in many of the year-end reviews, I gather you’re going to see some retroactive praise for President Obama, and how his Administration was able to hold off legislative gains from the other side. An exemplar [...]

I speculated yesterday that you could see a host of additional measures thrown into any deal for the payroll tax cut extension, including all the other expiring measures and even an alternation of the automatic trigger cuts that Republicans want to steer away from the defense budget. That’s exactly the kind of bargain that Eric [...]

The only way I can see the payroll tax cut getting extended is if the Democrats remain unified and not fall for some Republican counter-offer that would split their coalition. Right now, they’re standing firm on a tax cut for the working class in exchange for a surtax on millionaires. It’s a good political position. [...]

I like that only now, after nearly two years of deficit fearmongering, does the New York Times bother to mention that doing nothing on the deficit will reduce the deficit far more than any deal. The latest Congressional failure to agree on a plan for balancing the government’s books could yield a surprising result: a [...]

President Obama positioned himself well politically in his statement on the demise of the Super Committee yesterday, particularly with this passage: One way or another, we will be trimming the deficit by a total of at least $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s going to happen, one way or another. We’ve got $1 [...]

The co-chairs of the Super Committee, Patty Murray and Jeb Hensarling, quietly admitted defeat today, in an official statement. I will reproduce it below in full. “After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the [...]