by Dave Johnson | Jan 21, 2013 | Blog
Before the election reporters and pundits were saying that not so many people would turn out this time, that it would be close at best. But on election day it turned out that it wasn't even close. The people did turn out, some waiting in lines four, five, six hours to...
by Sam Pizzigati | Jan 20, 2013 | Blog
How do unequal societies solve the problems — like traffic congestion — that make us miserable? They come up with solutions that make life easier for rich people. Politicians and bureaucrats “inside the Beltway” that circles Washington, D.C., pundits like to prattle,...
by Robert Kuttner | Jan 18, 2013 | Blog
President Barack Obama won a tactical victory on New Year’s weekend by forcing Republicans to raise taxes on the top 1 percent, but he has far bigger challenges to address—and so do progressives. The economy is still at risk of several more years of hidden depression,...
by Bill Moyers | Jan 18, 2013 | Blog
On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Larry Cohen, president of the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, joins Bill to make the case for common-sense filibuster reform that would bring the Senate back to serving democracy. Cohen is a...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 18, 2013 | Economy
California’s deficits are gone, and Republicans are furious. The national deficit problem is largely solved, too, and Republicans just don't know what to do! Of course what we need to do is invest in modernizing our infrastructure, which will put people back to work...
by Digby | Jan 18, 2013 | Blog
I've never understood why so many people think the Social Security actuaries have always been innumerate morons, but perhaps that's just a result of the decades of propaganda about government workers. The fact is that from the very beginning the SSA accurately...
by Richard Long | Jan 18, 2013 | Blog
Election night 2012 definitely felt like a victory for progressives. President Obama won re-election convincingly, with more than half the electorate casting ballots for the president, Democrats picked up two Senate seats and eight House seats. The fears of...
by Bill Scher | Jan 18, 2013 | Uncategorized
MORNING MESSAGE: Too Much Health Care Is Not The Problem OurFuture.org's Dave Johnson: "Nate Silver has a much-discussed post today in The New York Times, 'What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending?' ... he is right: health care costs have been rising at an...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 18, 2013 | Blog
Nate Silver has a much-discussed post today in The New York Times, "What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending?" Silver goes over the numbers and writes: To clarify: all of the major categories of government spending have been increasing relative to inflation. But...
by Digby | Jan 17, 2013 | Blog
Glenn Thrush has an interesting analysis of President Obama's strategy on gun control and it's one with which I agree. This truly does seem to be a different approach than anything we saw from him in the first term: Over the years, Democrats have jokingly referred to...
by Terrance Heath | Jan 17, 2013 | Blog
Harold Myerson, over at the Washington Post, points out a new report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine contains some bad news about about the America's health. The title pretty much says it all: "U.S. Health in International...
by Jeff Bryant | Jan 17, 2013 | Education
Last week, celebrated statistics guru Nate Silver laid a bugger on advocates for test-driven education, the current policy fad that enamors Republicans and Democrats alike who fancy themselves as "education reformers." In an online conversation at the aggregator site...
by David Shuster | Jan 17, 2013 | Blog
As our nation promotes representative democracy around the world, it is time to finally bring it to those who don't have it here in the United States -- the citizens of Washington, D.C. As we discussed recently on Take Action News, the 618,000 residents of the...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 17, 2013 | Blog
The Senate is completely broken, with a minority obstructing everything. Minority. Obstructing. Every. Thing. Everything. There were more than 380 filibusters in just the last few years! In a few days the Senate will vote on fixing this and making them talk if they...
by Robert Borosage | Jan 17, 2013 | Minimum Wage
F. Scott Fitzgerald warned, "There are no second acts in American lives." And for recent American presidents, second acts have been brutal. The hope of the first act succumbs to the karmic reckonings of the second. Nixon cast out by his crimes in Watergate. Reagan...
by Bill Scher | Jan 17, 2013 | Uncategorized
MORNING MESSAGE: Business Roundtable Attacks The Elderly OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "Rich CEOs have used every tax loophole in the book to add to their own wealth, have been bailed out directly or indirectly by the American taxpayer, and have rigged corporate...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 16, 2013 | Blog
Here's a thought experiment: What if a group of Social Security and Medicare recipients wanted to increase their benefits by, say, 1,000 percent, and proposed seizing rich people's assets – houses, cars, boats, whatever – to pay for it? And whenever anybody suggested...
by Stan Collender | Jan 16, 2013 | The Sequester
Over at The Plum Line, Greg Sargent has an important post about the way the debt ceiling fight could end without triggering a cash-crunch crisis for the federal government. Greg thinks is could be one of two possibilities. First, the House GOP could agree to a version...
by Terrance Heath | Jan 16, 2013 | Blog, Rick Perlstein
Today, President Obama signed a broad array of executive orders to curb gun violence, in what was the boldest Presidential action against gun violence since the Clinton administration. In a speech that recalled the shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Col., and...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 16, 2013 | Economy
Our country has so many urgent needs and two of them are the need for jobs for millions of unemployed people, and the need to upgrade our aging, crumbling infrastructure. Our current policy -- enforced by GOP filibusters of bills to fix the country's infrastructure --...
by Bill Scher | Jan 16, 2013 | Uncategorized
MORNING MESSAGE: Declare Victory Over The Deficit OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "When it comes to spending cuts, it’s time to follow the advice a general offered when we were mired in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out ... Washington needs to spend more money now...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
That deficit problem we keep hearing about is gone. When it comes to spending cuts, it's time to follow the advice a general offered when we were mired in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out. We had a deficit problem, once, although it was never as urgent or as...
by Stan Collender | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
Politico had an outstanding but truly bone-chilling story yesterday about how appealing the prospects of a default and a government shutdown may be to House Republicans. According to the piece by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Jake Sherman, forcing a default by not...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 15, 2013 | Making it in America, Minimum Wage
Walmart has announced an initiative to buy more American-made goods and hire more than 100,000 veterans during the next five years. This is great. Will they pay the veterans a living wage? Or will they hand them instructions on how to apply for food stamps? Walmart...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
The debt-ceiling law is a mistake. All lifting the debt ceiling does is authorize Congress to borrow the money that is needed to pay the bills that Congress has already mandated be paid. Tomorrow representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Jim Moran...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
Yesterday, the president of the United States held a press conference with the DC elite press corps. They had the opportunity to ask the president what our government is doing about the nation's most serious problems. There were no questions about the climate change...
by Kenneth Bernstein | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
We were sitting in a Starbucks in Arlington, Va. It was our first meeting. Previously, Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and I had talked by phone and exchanged blog posts on education. His campaign staff had reached out to a number of educational bloggers, as he was...
by Bill Scher | Jan 15, 2013 | Uncategorized
MORNING MESSAGE: Trade That Hurts United Steelworkers' Leo Gerard: "'Uncertainty' is the pitchfork that corporations now effectively wield to prod politicians into action. It’s a threat, as in, if Congress doesn’t do this or that, such as avoid the fiscal cliff or...
by Leo Gerard | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
“Uncertainty” is the pitchfork that corporations now effectively wield to prod politicians into action. It’s a threat, as in, if Congress doesn’t do this or that, such as avoid the fiscal cliff or raise the debt ceiling, then corporations will suffer the unbearable...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 15, 2013 | Blog
Sunday I interviewed Leo Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers, a union with 1.3 million members. Now that we know Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is leaving the administration and a new Labor Secretary will be appointed and confirmed, I asked him...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 14, 2013 | Blog
People were outraged that AIG's board of directors considered suing its own rescuers last week. As a former AIG employee, I had a slightly different take on that story: The outrage was warranted (and Warren-ted), but there was somebody behind the scenes pulling the...
by Bill Moyers | Jan 14, 2013 | Blog
Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that saving money is not the path to economic recovery. Instead, he says, we should put aside our excessive focus on the deficit, try to overcome political recalcitrance, and spend money to...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 14, 2013 | Blog
By all accounts Aaron Swartz was brilliant, gifted, idealistic ... and fragile. Too bad he wasn't "too big to fail." I never met Aaron, but I know a lot of people who knew him well. (We did "converse" as members of the same online discussion group.) I learned about...
by Digby | Jan 14, 2013 | The Sequester
Krugman says that he gets phone calls: The White House insists that it is absolutely, positively not going to cave or indeed even negotiate over the debt ceiling — that it rejected the coin option as a gesture of strength, as a way to put the onus for avoiding default...
by Liz Rose | Jan 14, 2013 | Blog
Sometimes when I get a bill I don’t feel like paying it. But I do, because I’m a responsible adult. If I don’t pay my bills, I get in trouble. It’s true for a family and for a government. Republicans in Congress are creating another manufactured default crisis....
by Dave Johnson | Jan 14, 2013 | Blog
A number of the DC elites are talking about changing the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation. This is a great idea, as long as any such adjustment measures the things the elderly actually spend money on. Let’s do it! Let's change the way we adjust...
by Stan Collender | Jan 14, 2013 | Blog
The U.S. Treasury yesterday dashed the hopes and dreams of many in the blogosphere when it announced that neither it nor the Federal Reserve saw the idea of a $1 trillion platinum coin as a realistic alternative to raising the debt ceiling. Actually, the Treasury...
by Bill Scher | Jan 14, 2013 | Uncategorized
MORNING MESSAGE: Is Our Budget Out Of Control? IMF Says Yes. Charts Say No. OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "The IMF report calls us 'profligate' because of the imbalance between the amount of money our government collects and the amount it spends. But, as Howard...
by Sam Pizzigati | Jan 13, 2013 | Blog
Can a democracy survive if the richest of the rich within it can pass on to their heirs, generation after generation, the vast bulk of their fortunes? In the United States, that question first became a top-tier topic of political debate back over a century ago....
by Richard Eskow | Jan 13, 2013 | Blog
A new press release says that forty more corporate CEOs, including JetBlue's, have joined a covert lobbying group for Wall Street, billionaires and the defense industry called "Fix the Debt." Fix the Debt is attacking Social Security, Medicare and other vital...
