Bush's Tax Cuts Need to Go

Ezra Klein crunches the numbers and comes up with a lower total than you think

(NEWSER) - Mitt Romney has taken to carrying around a debt clock, blaming President Obama for the ever-climbing number it shows. But the clock doesn't show how much Obama has actually added to that debt, so Ezra Klein set out to find out. "There are two answers," he writes in the Washington Post . The first, which is "simple and wrong" is $4.7 trillion. That's what you get when you subtract the debt when Obama took office (about $10.5 trillion) from the current debt (about $15.2 trillion). More»

John Boehner isn't the kind of opposition leader we need

(NEWSER) - Sometimes, Ruth Marcus thinks it would be nice if the country had a divided government. It would force the GOP to quit posturing and start governing, and allow Democrats to make hard choices on entitlement spending. “That’s the theory. Then there’s John Boehner,” she laments in the Washington Post . The would-be House speaker gave a speech outlining his agenda yesterday, and it was “a depressing blend of tired ideas, tired-er one liners, and cheap attacks.” More»

Axing the Bush tax cuts is just the start

(NEWSER) - Tim Geithner said something pretty interesting about the Bush tax cuts in his speech yesterday at the Center for American Progress. The Treasury secretary explained why the administration was letting the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans expire now. “The world is likely to view any temporary extension … as a prelude to a permanent extension,” he said, which would undermine world confidence in our willingness to reduce future deficits. More»

(NEWSER) - Republicans have become born-again deficit hawks, decrying the debt President Obama is handing America’s grandkids. “What’s missing,” writes Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post, “is any sense of perspective.” The added $2 trillion pales before the $66 trillion spent annually on Social Security and Medicare, and could be paid back in a year, if the US cut spending 15%. That would hurt—but not as much as doing nothing about the recession. More»

Congressional Budget Office releases its assessment

(NEWSER) - Good news/bad news time. Good news: The deficit will fall this year, thanks to additional tax revenue and major cuts in government spending. Bad news: It's still going to be $1.1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimate released today; last year's total was $1.3 trillion. If the figure is accurate, 2012 will be the fourth year in a row that the government has run at least a trillion dollars short, Bloomberg reports. More»