A report today reminds us Newt Gingrich was responsible for securing passage of the huge unpaid for Medicare Drug Act of 2003 that added hundreds of billions to federal debt. Now he’s proposing a massive tax cut that would reward the rich and create over a trillion dollars in annual deficits.

This book is a fast and easy read so you will absorb a ton of well-researched factual knowledge without losing your horse, crawling through the desert, or emptying your canteen. It’s a fun, easy way to learn and understand a whole lot of important information that banksters would prefer you never know and delivered in a way that exposes the hypocrisy of many of the proposed “cures” for our current economic woes. It really is a terrific learning tool and delivers information in a form that even Members of Congress should be able to understand.

David Brooks is really upset: We may have a lost decade because he is sitting there being right, standing in the middle, and the two extremes who control public debate won’t agree with him. But one side did the math, the other didn’t, and neither did Brooks.

Over the last year, one phrase has continually popped up to justify a lack of investment to help create jobs and grow the US economy – “economic certainty.” This phrase was used to justify and praise the extension of the Bush/Obama tax cuts in December. It was used for the Debt Ceiling increase. It is being used to justify the Super Committee efforts and the push for another tax holiday for corporations on their overseas profits.

The New York Times hits on a major reason for why the economy has struggled over the past several months. Government assistance has faded, turning the stimulus into anti-stimulus. While extended unemployment benefits will last until the end of the year, other stimulus-era programs to beef up government benefits, 20% of all compensation in the US, are slowly being pulled away, and as a result, consumer spending decreases and businesses see less sales. And it will only get worse.

The NYT’s Mary Williams Walsh fails to mention the role played by the massive tax cuts that the vast majority of states pushed through in the 1990s. It was known, as far back as 2002, that these tax cuts were going to cause major problems down the road — in fact, they were already causing problems for the states, and the people who help.

What makes Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, such a joy to read, is not the challenge it poses to the bad economics that undergirds global finance, though it does precisely that. Just as Thomas did nearly 40 years ago, Chang’s book succeeds, fundamentally, because it challenges the dead language that is used to market as progress our growing political discontent.

The deficit reduction plan President Obama vaguely outlined yesterday lacks basic credibility. The problem isn’t that the math doesn’t add up–it is at least a dramatic improvement over Republican Paul Ryan’s plan, which literally defies logic and basic math. This issue is that many of the reductions President Obama promised yesterday come from actions that he has been promising for years, yet when the opportunity came up to fulfill them, he actively violated his word.

Hey Paul Ryan. I’ve got a better, simpler plan for returning the country to prosperity. Here it is.

Bipartisanship is rare, but it seems there is one thing governors of both parties can agree on: “Shared sacrifice” really means more tax cuts for the rich to force regular people to share all the sacrifice.