As every responsible media outlet and economic analyst is reporting, Donald Trump's economic plan for America would be a complete disaster for anyone not already incredibly wealthy.  The plan is essentially a more extreme version of the policies George W. Bush enacted during his ...read more

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM: In response to President Obama’s extensive comments about the fiscal cliff at the White House Wednesday afternoon, House Speaker John Boehner left himself little if any room to continue negotiations. Here’s the key piece of Boehner’s ...read more

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Huff Post: With the tax-hiking proposal President Barack Obama sent to Congress on Thursday, it seems the president is finally heeding a lesson he learned in the first month of his first term. At a press conference in February 2009, ...read more

By Bob Cesca: We've all known a kid who upon losing a board game would freak out, hurl the game across the room and storm off while shouting something like, "This game sucks anyway!" The modern permutation of this unhinged sour grapes tantrum is to chuck a video game controller ...read more

The looming fight over the 'fiscal cliff' promises to be another gigantic sellout of the middle classes and poor. President Obama has talked about a 'Grand Bargain' he intends to make with the Republicans in order to stop a set of $1.2 trillion spending cuts and tax hikes that ...read more

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Huff Post: WASHINGTON -- Conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Sunday the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much-criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the ...read more

By Bob Cesca: Throughout the last 24 hours, Republicans and Romney surrogates have been scrambling to twist their walnut brains around their candidate's remarkably wrong/misleading/stupid hidden video remarks. Some of them have desperately pointed at the president's 2008 ...read more

By Bob Cesca: The smartest thing about the choice of Paul Ryan as Romney's running mate is that in order to criticize him, Democrats will have to get wonky about it. There's nothing wrong with being wonky, of course, but details about policy -- especially budget and economic ...read more

James Kwak laments the ever rightwards shifting debate on economics in America: The fact that Simpson-Bowles—which uses its mandate of deficit reduction to call for . . . lower tax rates?—has become widely perceived as a centrist starting-point for discussion is clear evidence of ...read more

By Bob Cesca: I'd like to get down to the bottom line when it comes to the deficit, the president's fiscal policies and the impact of government spending during and after deep recessions. This week I wrote a piece about Rove's latest Crossroads GPS commercial attacking the ...read more

The big lie in modern politics is that tax cuts for the rich creates jobs. This lie has been repeated over and over again for the past 30 years and has led to one of the most unequal societies in history. Republicans (and many Democrats) cynically describe tax cutting legislation ...read more