Media

The public sector lost another 13,000 jobs in December, bringing the post-recession job loss total for federal, state, and local governments to more than 600,000. Those job losses — many of which have hit teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public safety officials — have had a devastating impact on the economic recovery.

For every five workers who were hired in the past three months, one was laid off by government. 

Given his long record of climate advocacy, John Kerry’s nomination for Secretary of State is a sign that climate change may receive more attention in the second Obama Administration. In addition to co-sponsoring a cap-and-trade bill in the Senate, Kerry made it a point in his presidential campaign to deride the Bush Administration’s lack of belief in climate change.

In his post-mortem on the fiscal cliff negotiations, David Leonhardt argues that President Obama’s incentives throughout were to reduce inequality. In that light, he writes, the deal was a success.

New York -- In response to the late night passage of a tax deal by the US House of Representatives, Miles Rapoport, president of the national nonpartisan public policy organization Demos released the following statement:

"It is in the nature of a complicated bipartisan agreement that it looks very different depending on what prism you look at it through.  Two elements are critically important: what is actually in the bill that passed and the President will sign, and how its passage ‘sets up’ the future fiscal debates.

It is in the nature of a complicated bipartisan agreement that it looks very different depending on what prism you look at it through.  Two elements are critically important: what is actually in the bill that passed and the president will sign, and how its passage ‘sets up’ the future fiscal debates.

This is the headline we should really be seeing after last night's fiscal cliff deal.

As a result of the deal, the bulk of the Bush tax cuts will remain permanently in place, the AMT will be eliminated, and Obama's stimulus tax cuts, mainly aimed at the working poor, will live on for another five years (as well as stimulus tax cuts for business.)

Now that the future revenue path is pretty clear for the next decade, I took another look at President Obama's 2013 budget, which projects spending and revenue through 2022 on the assumption -- a correct one, it turns out -- that taxes will only rise on the affluent.