All Life Is Problem Solving

Self-styled “progressive organizations” and commentators have been releasing their own deficit reduction plans in reply to the plans released by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici, and The Peterson-Pew Commission. These new plans, were released by the Institute for America’s Future, Citizens Commission on Jobs, Deficits, and America’s Economic Future and […]

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In a recent post I wrote about “The Real Solution to the Fiscal Sustainability Problem.” But I was just kidding, folks. That was a solution only for people who think that Fiscal Sustainability means controlling the growth of the national debt, and stabilizing and reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio. That view of Fiscal Sustainability, however, doesn’t […]

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This week and last we’ve seen the appearance of four plans for “deficit and debt reduction.” Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson started things off by releasing their Co-Chair’s plan. At about the same time, the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform issued a plan on reform of the budgetary process designed to ensure that fiscal rules […]

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Pretty soon I plan to start blogging about the presentations and discussions emerging from the Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-Conference. But, first, I want to discuss the program design and its logic. That design was basically a reaction to the framing of the deficit hawk messaging developed from the beginning of the Obama Administration. The Peterson […]

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A few days ago I began a critique of the Catfood Commission Co-Chair Proposals draft, by focusing on a single slide of their presentation stating “our guiding principles and values.” There was enough objectionable material on that slide to justify a post. But there’s much more worth commenting on in the succeeding slides on the […]

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This is the first of a number of posts on the Catfood Commission’s latest travesty: the Co-Chair’s Proposal. The proposal begins with statements about “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” I’ll analyze the first page in this statement of principles in this post. 1.We have a patriotic duty to come together on a plan that will […]

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New Deal 2.0 (ND20) is, well, more New Dealish than other web sites, so instead of the usual conflict between deficit hawks and deficit doves, we might see at, say, the New York Times. Here things are shifted to the left, and we see a debate between the deficit doves and the deficit owls. The […]

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Paul Krugman, well-known for his opposition to the austerity concerns of the deficit terrorists and his advocacy of additional Government stimulus to lower unemployment and end the recession, just ignited a paradigm conflict which promises to clarify for many, the issues dividing “deficit doves” like Paul, from economists who take a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) […]

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Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the Co-Chairs of “the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” would have us believe that a deficit and debt crisis threatening the fiscal future of the United States is upon us, that “This debt is like a cancer,” and that unless we begin to make across the board cuts […]

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In my last post, I continued my analysis of the June 26th AmericaSpeaks Community Conversation event I attended in Falls Church, VA, focusing on Step Five in the decision process used in the meeting. In that post I presented the specific option choice frameworks AmericaSpeaks presented to participants in the categories of Non-Defense and Defense […]

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