“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “but not to his own facts.” Unfortunately, a decade of political science has demonstrated that, when it comes to politics, the line between facts and opinions is often blurred and occasionally obliterated. The current election season provides some prime examples. Consider: “Do you think the unemployment rate has increased or decreased since Barack Obama became president?” That seems like a pretty straightforward factual question, but Americans’ answers are all over the map. Almost one-third of the 1000 respondents in a recent YouGov survey said that unemployment has “increased ... read more

Next month, Congress will once again face the question of how to extend a temporary payroll tax cut that has been in effect for the past year. Republicans tried their best to duck that debate—and with good reason. As long as the issue is framed in terms of how to extend the payroll tax cut, they are unlikely to prevail. And if they lose, what is supposed to be a “temporary” extension could turn out to provide a significant precedent for a long-term shift in the progressivity of the American tax system. A few weeks ago, House Republicans grudgingly accepted ... read more

Talk of austerity is sweeping Washington these days. In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama told Americans that the country’s current fiscal situation is “not sustainable,” and called for a series of “painful cuts” in government programs, including a five-year freeze in domestic spending, reductions in health care costs, and “tens of billions of dollars” of cuts in defense spending. The Republican response to the president’s speech, by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, was even more dire. Ryan warned of “a crushing burden of debt” that “will soon eclipse our entire economy and grow to ... read more

During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama skillfully crafted a popular position on renewing the big Bush-era tax cuts. Obama pledged to keep the lower tax rates for families earning less than $250,000 per year—the vast majority of American taxpayers—while letting the top tax rate revert to its 2000 level.With the tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year President Obama has stuck to that position, despite a concerted effort by conservatives to insist that none of the tax cuts should be allowed to expire in the midst of a recession. What is more, he has managed to ... read more