Roll Call

... and experts at the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the Concord Coalition and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. ...

Maya MacGuineas is the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation. and more »

“We haven’t seen anywhere near the final act in terms of lobbying,” said Stephen Burd, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. “This is just the overture.” Original article (subscription required)

Prior to the crisis, McCain was promising to balance the federal budget by 2013, but the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that, at best, he'd rack up a deficit of $147 billion.

The committee estimated McCain's proposed tax cuts to cost $417 billion to $485 billion that year - based on his campaign's own estimates - but another group, the Brookings Institution-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, said they could cost $700 billion, based on McCain's statements in stump… more

...Much-discussed and deservedly praised, Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam paints a grim picture of working-class prospects, both economically and socially, under prevailing circumstances.

Instead of being a society where anybody can "make it," Douthat and Salam describe the United States as increasingly becoming an "inherited meritocracy" where the wealthy and well-educated get more so and those without education and skills get left behind and face a life of stress and insecurity... LINK

Regarding Rep. Ryan's proposed fiscal policy strategy:

...Maya MacGuineas, president of Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, had high praise. "Comparing it to the current path we are on, it is a vast improvement, and comparing it to the other Congressional plans out there, well, there are none..." LINK (subscription required)

In recent years, America has lurched from one economic bubble to the next. Early this decade, the dot-com bubble burst, sending financial markets into a tailspin. As lower interest rates helped to ease the bursting of that bubble, we shifted to over-investing in housing -- again culminating in a tremendous misallocation of resources and economic losses, as we currently are seeing. Now, as we try to contend with the bursting of the housing bubble, we face what may be the… more

Moderate Graybeards Need a Top 10 Agenda (Roll Call) One possible model is the New America Foundation's proposed "progressive consumption tax," which would base taxes on the difference between income and savings, with rates rising with income. ...

The collapse of the Minnesota interstate bridge, coupled with the explosion of a steam tunnel in Manhattan, should arouse the country to the need for massive infrastructure investment -- and reform of the way it’s financed.

It’s a miracle that more people weren’t killed and injured in the two instances...

Urgent attention will be paid for a few weeks to America’s highway bridges -- 15 percent to 25 percent of which are believed to be structurally deficient -- because of the collapse… more