Perhaps the best hope for long-term deficit reduction currently on the table is a bipartisan plan being crafted in the Senate. It’s roughly based on the proposal presented by the President’s deficit commission last year and would include discretionary spending cuts, Medicare/Medicaid reform, changes to Social Security and an overhaul of the tax code. Of [...]
Slashing $100 billion from the 2011 budget may have appeased the Tea Party caucus and the freshman class, but it’s turning out to be not so comfortable for some Republican moderates. On Monday New York Republicans Pete King and Michael Grimm sent Speaker Boehner a letter protesting cuts to transit security grants, the COPS program [...]
South Dakota shelves bill redefining “justifiable homicide” to (possibly, in the future) allow killing of doctors who perform abortions. Probably a good idea, since whether or not the bill actually would permit such acts hardly matters if anti-abortion activists think that it does. From the NYT: Dave Leach, an Iowa anti-abortion activist, praised the bill, [...]
Updated, 8:50 p.m. Thousands of Wisconsin’s union workers and supporters crowded into the state capitol in Madison for a second day to protest a bill that would strip key collective-bargaining rights from public employees. The measure, introduced last Friday by new Republican Governor Scott Walker, would take away public-worker unions’ ability to negotiate pensions, working [...]
Teach for America, the brilliant program that has sent tens of thousands of elite college graduates to work in the poorest, toughest schools, is about to get stiffed by the federal government. “We are, technically, an earmark,” Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, told me this morning. “I’m not sure exactly why we’re considered an earmark, but [...]
Fed Officials Forecast Economic Growth for 2011 …Fed officials say in an updated forecast that they think the economy will grow between 3.4 percent and 3.9 percent this year. That’s an upward revision from their November forecast, which predicted that gross domestic product will grow 3 percent to 3.6 percent. *Except Republicans who hope to [...]
