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President Trump still has solid support from about a quarter of the electorate and more tenuous support from another 10 to 15 percent. On the other hand, a very solid majority oppose his policies and believe he is performing...
I don’t think that I am alone in wondering why equity markets have not only held their own but have actually added value despite signs of growing chaos in Washington. Do investors believe that the broader economy and corporate...
One of the sad ironies in this nation’s fight over health care is that those with the most desperate need for coverage appear to be supportive of the elected officials most likely to take it away. This strange reality...
The Democratic Party is just about as badly bruised right now as I have ever seen it. Potentially, however, it faces the brightest future it has had in decades. The Democratic Party is just about as badly bruised right now...

Good Luck Mr. Trump!

One of my earliest recollections as a child was standing in my grandmother’s kitchen the morning after the 1952 election and watching her try to hide her tears as she went about her morning chores. She was terrified that...
Cleo A. Noel Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his deputy, George Moore, were preparing to leave a reception at the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum when eight gunmen in a Land Rover stormed in to take hostages from...
One great irony in the current debate over cutting federal spending is the label House Republicans have placed on the tiny sliver of federal spending they’ve targeted for cuts in their budget proposal for the remainder of fiscal year...
This article was originally posted at AmericanProgress.org. Less than a week after the House Appropriations Committee sorted out its final staff assignments, their new chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), gave his subcommittees one week to find the $44 billion in...
The incoming leadership and committee chairmen of the U.S. House of Representatives have been boasting about their ambitious, time-consuming plans to conduct intensive oversight and ferret out waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government. Yet the new House...
Dick Cheney’s famous statement “deficits don’t matter” is generally associated with the Bush administration’s philosophy on taxation. A strong case can be made, however, that this view of budget policy also influenced that administration’s spending policies. Between 2000 and...
Should the Federal Government Strengthen Efforts to Fight Profiteering? A few months ago I came across an annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by a small pharmaceutical company in Maryland. Making sense of such reports is often...
t is obvious that some number of Republican pollsters have come up with the notion that attacking the federal workforce provides a golden political opening in a period when the public is deeply distressed by unemployment, the federal deficit...
This article was first posted at AmericanProgress.org. I am sure that Jonathan Alter’s recent column in Newsweek, “How Congress Keeps Screwing Up Education — President Obama’s school-reform programs are falling victim to the teachers’ unions,” is as funny to the...
It is always risky to attempt to give a history lesson to an old history professor, but Newt Gingrich’s column in this morning’s Washington Post, requires that someone try. His attempt to attach the label of “secular socialist machine”...
This article was first posted at AmericanProgress.org. People who are opposed to health care reform are raising a real ruckus over a possible parliamentary maneuver being considered by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). She is thinking of asking...
House Republicans will meet today to announce that they are renouncing the use of earmarks. Given that Democrats announced the day before that they were banning the earmarking of federal dollars to for-profit businesses, the only opportunity for one-ups-manship...
This article was first posted at AmericanProgress.org. Twenty years ago I was the staff director of the Democratic Study Group, an organization that among other things provided research to members of the House of Representatives. By 1990 we had expanded...
This article first appeared at AmericanProgress.org. The federal budget is big and perplexing. Sometimes it seems like nothing more than a sea of random numbers. But it is not; it is a decision-making document that profoundly affects the lives of...
If you want to understand the extraordinary events taking place in the fight over health care reform, you should take Deep Throat’s advice to Bob Woodward many years ago during Woodward’s coverage of the Watergate story: follow the money....
Read the entire report at AmericanProgress.org. The current economic relationship between the United States and China is perilous for both countries. The nature of that peril is quite different than is commonly perceived. China’s large and rapidly growing stash of U.S....

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Will Congress Push Public Debt to 97 Percent of GDP?

The Congressional Budget Office has released an analysis of the new House Republican tax plan which indicates that the deficit will increase by $1.7...
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