Robert Kuttner

When Joe Nocera was promoted from The New York Times business section to an op-ed column of his own, I was ambivalent. On the one hand, this rather neo-liberal writer has been somewhat radicalized by the financial crisis. He had been doing good work in the business section, and it was good to have a […]

The Congressional Budget Office is out with a report that should give pause to sponsors of austerity economics and opponents of repealing the Bush tax cuts. The report, released today, is the CBO’s semi-annual update of economic and budget conditions. Among key projections: “[T]he pace of the recovery has been slow, and the economy remains […]

Elizabeth Warren is officially running for the Senate seat held by Scott Brown. There are several reasons to cheer this. For starters, she is the most compelling new progressive leader to come along in many a year. At a time with few genuine public figures who command admiration, Warren is one. She knows how to […]

As progressives sift through the entrails of the budget deal, there is some guarded optimism on two grounds. First, despite claims by House Speaker John Boehner, it turns out tax increases, or other revenue enhancements such as loophole closings, would count towards the $1.5 trillion dollars in mandatory deficit reduction to which Congress and President […]

In the late 1920s, the French minister of war was one Andre Maginot, a World War I veteran with a handlebar mustache and a limp. M. Maginot, learning the lessons of the last war, had the idea that if France could just build an impregnable fortification on its eastern frontiers, Germany could never again invade […]

The stakes of our leaders’ surreal obsession with deficits just got a lot higher. The economy could tip from stagnation into a real depression. As it dawned on Wall Street that austerity would not in fact help the real economy, panic selling ensued. The swooning stock market, in turn, creates one more source of belt-tightening […]

In the financial crisis, the signature of the credit-rating companies has been that they are a day late and a dollar short. In this case, $2 trillion. S&P made a $2 trillion error in the computations that were the basis of its rationale for downgrading Treasury securities. But that was petty cash compared to what […]

Let’s take a moment to recall the logic of the deficit hysteria and the related deal just signed by President Obama. The economy, supposedly, was mired in stagnation because of a lack of “confidence.” That confidence gap, in turn, reflected anxiety about the escalating deficits and national debt. Deal with the debt, and businesses would […]

A number of commentators have asked: Why did the president categorically reject recourse to the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling, even as a bargaining chit, when that rejection forced Democrats to accept a deal mostly on Republican terms? The New York Times‘ Joe Nocera writes: My own view is that Obama should have […]

While Congress completes action on the deal to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for deep spending cuts, the economy is on the brink of a deeper recession. And by the time phase two of the deal approaches, between Thanksgiving and Christmas (whose great idea was that?), members of both parties could be singing a […]