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»

...except for Ron Paul's plan

(NEWSER) - The GOP presidential candidates do an awful lot of talking about fiscal conservativism, but when their budgets meet the road, there seems to be plenty of rubber involved. The budget plans of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich would all greatly expand the national debt, independent analysts find. The shining exception to the rule is Ron Paul, whose plan for huge cuts to government services would cut future borrowing by $2 trillion, the Washington Post reports. Santorum and Gingrich, on the other hand, would probably force the US to borrow trillions of dollars. More»