After the November elections, members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill for their “lame duck” session with one huge piece of unfinished business – the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. And while they failed to complete work on the budget – the government is currently running on a “continuing resolution” that funds federal agencies through March 4, 2011 – the lame duck session did pass legislation on a number of serious issues.Incidentally, if you’re wondering about the phrase, “lame ducks” are those members of Congress who lost their election (or did not seek another term), but are still in office because their ...

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { }

During the holiday season, many of us

wish for a “White Christmas” while we “dream by the fire.”

For others, the warmth of the season is illusive, with high heating

costs and declining income leaving them vulnerable to the cold.

Congress created two programs to help the less fortunate afford to

heat their home during the winter: the Low Income Home Energy

Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and the Weatherization Assistance Program

(WAP).

The deadly effects of lack of warmth

during the winter are a statistical reality. Two economists

associated with the National Bureau of Economic ...

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { }

With the clock ticking away on the last

session of the 111th Congress, the Democratic leadership

in the House and Senate have a few bills they still need to get

passed. The largest, most important one is the budget for the

government. The federal fiscal year began October 1st, and

the federal agencies have been running on continuing resolutions –

or “CRs” – ever since.

As we noted in our blog on December

8th, a CR is legislation that keeps agencies running at

the previous year's funding levels to avoid a government shut

down. Government ...

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { }

Yesterday, President Obama signed the

Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 into law with his wife, a

strong anti-childhood obesity advocate, by his side. The law has two

main goals: to increase the number of students who are able to get

free or reduced price breakfasts and lunches at their school and to

ensure the food they have access to is healthy and nutritious.

Why is this important? In 2009,

the latest year for which data is available, 14.7% of U.S. households

were food insecure, meaning

there was at least once ...

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { }

This week there was a lot of media

coverage of the tentative agreement reached between the Obama

Administration and congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era

tax cuts. The agreement came after the GOP leadership announced its

intention to block any legislation during the current “lame duck”

session until the tax issue was resolved. In return for extending the

Bush-era tax cuts for two years, unemployment benefits will be

extended for another 13 months and all Americans will get a 2% break

on Social Security payroll taxes. These news stories assume you know

what all ...

In the topsy-turvy world that is Washington, D.C., these days, Congress is struggling to find a way to fulfill its primary function -- pass a budget.The government is currently being funded by a “continuing resolution.” The current fiscal year – FY 2011 – actually began on October 1, 2010, right before Representatives and Senators went home to campaign. Yet Congress failed to enact any of the twelve separate appropriations bills which keep federal agencies running. Instead, they adopted a “continuing resolution” (CR) as an interim measure. What a CR does is provide funding for areas of the federal government whose specific ...

Earlier today, the 18

members of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and

Reform voted to approve the final version of the proposal issued by the

Commission's Co-Chairs, Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. The vote was

11-7, short of the 14 votes which, according to the panel's rules, are needed

to prompt congressional action.

Failure to reach the 14 vote

threshold also means that the Simpson-Bowles proposal is not the Commission’s

final report. Yet despite this, the question of federal deficit reduction and

controlling the national debt will not go away. 

In addition to ...

In Prague last April, President Obama

raised the world’s hopes with his speech calling for a “nuclear

free future.” Since then, his Administration has made

non-proliferation – preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to

other nations – a top

national security priority.

As part of this effort, U.S. officials

negotiated important, but modest, reductions in the number of U.S.

and Russian nuclear weapons Yet, even as we monitor arms control

gains, we must also be aware that President Obama's FY2011 budget

proposed increases in nuclear weapons spending to levels not seen

since the Reagan Administration. Indeed, General Chilton ...

Last week Congress returned to

Washington, D.C. for it's “lame duck” session and began their

final weeks of law making before the holiday season and the new

Congress is inaugurated. With none of the twelve annual

appropriations for Fiscal Year 2011 (which began on October 1). that

fund the federal government yet approved, and the government running

on continuing resolutions, questions about the budget loom large. A

projected deficit of over $1 trillion has encouraged endless parties

to offer up ways to cut federal spending.

NPP's new “On The Block” series

looks at federal programs targeted for ...

Last week the Co-Chairmen of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform -- former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson and former White House Chief-of-Staff Erskine Bowles -- released their draft deficit reduction proposal. The Simpson-Bowles plan seeks to reduce the deficit by $372 billion in Fiscal Year 2015, more than President Obama’s target of $250 billion. Today, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a member of the Commission, issued her own proposal to reduce the federal deficit, saving $428 billion in FY 2015.

Both proposals are intent on solving the same problem – reigning in the spiraling federal debt – and they share ...

This week members of

Congress return to Capitol Hill for their “lame duck” session. If you’re

wondering about the phrase, “lame ducks” are those members who either

lost their election (or did not seek another term), but are still in office

because their term has not yet officially ended. So a “lame duck session” of

Congress is one that occurs after the election but before new members of Congress

are sworn in in January.

The question about lame duck

sessions is whether anyone will take their work seriously. I’m a former

congressional staffer, and as one of my ...

Congress

is scheduled to return on November 15 for what is known as a lame

duck session – a post-election period when members who have

been voted out of office return to Washington to continue work prior

to January when the new Congress will be sworn in.

Members

will work for a week, take a week off for Thanksgiving and then

return. They have a great deal to do. Issues

Congress will consider include:

2001

and

2003 tax cutsFY

2011 appropriations billsUnemployment

Insurance

Taxes

The

2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts are set to expire on December 31. There

seems to ...

On election night, Democrats and Republicans agreed - it's all about jobs, deficits and taxes.While they agree on the problem, they absolutely disagree on the solutions.And the big question is, what's going to happen in Congress?Join us as NPP demystifies three of the most pressing issues of our time from the ground up.

Our latest webinar Jobs, Deficits & Taxes

is a 30-minute presentation (with Q&A) that contextualizes the

ongoing public discussions about these critical and timely budget

issues.Information in Jobs, Deficits & Taxes includes:Unemployment in America and the long road to recoveryThe impact of ...

NPP very recently

updated all its Federal

Priorities Database expenditures and indicators to the state

level with the latest data available.

We invite you to

use the database – especially if you want a post-election

memory of the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

(ARRA). See what funding states received in 2009 for job creation,

housing, food security work and more.

It's essential

that people in our nation hold on to a belief in government as an

agent for the common good. Let's tell the truth, everyone wants

economic recovery. The questions this November morning are who ...

I recently participated in a

panel discussion sponsored by members of the “Save Our Schools” campaign in Framingham, MA,

as an expert on the federal budget process and the impact of the recession on

communities.

Like most cities and towns

in Massachusetts and across the country, Framingham has been

experiencing budgetary shortfalls in recent years that have forced community

leaders to make some very hard choices about how to provide critical services

while staying within their budgetary means. And as in other communities, after

several years of austerity, the fat has long ago been cut from the city’s

budget ...

With

Election Day just around the corner, the question on the minds of

many people is “what’s going to happen in Washington?”

Regardless

of the outcome of Tuesday’s elections, members of Congress will

return to Capitol Hill for their “lame duck” session with one

huge piece of unfinished business – the Fiscal Year 2011 budget.

Fiscal

Year 2011 actually began on October 1, 2010 – right before

Representatives and Senators went home to campaign. Yet Congress

failed to enact any of the twelve separate appropriations bills which

keep federal agencies running. Instead, they adopted a Continuing

Resolution (CR) as a ...

Yesterday,

the Social

Security Administration released an extraordinary amount of data

– all the way to the ZIP code-level – focused on Social Security

beneficiaries (categorized by the government within three groupings:

Old Age, Survivor and Disability). The data lets us see not only the

number of folks in a particular area receiving Social Security

support, but also the reason for that support.This

comes, of course, on the heels of last week's announcement that there

would be no cost of living increase (or COLA) for millions of Social

Security recipients for FY2011, the second year in a row. NPP's ...

That’s the

message Congressmen Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX), along

with 55 of their Capitol Hill colleagues are pushing.On October 13,

2010 they sent a letter to the President’s National Commission on

Fiscal Responsibility and Reform advocating defense cuts. The letter

contains a broad range of options for cutting Pentagon spending, and

states that “it is clear to us that cutting the military budget

must be part of any viable [deficit/debt reduction] proposal.” The

Commission is scheduled to release its recommendations on December 1,

2010Many of the

proposals included by Reps. Frank and Paul ...

I was

recently a guest lecturer at William

Paterson University (WPU) in Wayne, New Jersey. Part of the New

Jersey state system, WPU is home to a very diverse and dedicated

student body – many of them the first in their families to attend

college and virtually all of them working their way through school.Maybe

it was because I arrived just days after Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

handed Newark's Mayor Corry Booker a check for $100 million dollars

for Newark's (NJ's largest city) schools during an episode of the

Oprah Winfrey Show, or maybe it was because ...

President Harry

Truman once said, “It's a recession when your neighbor loses his

job; it's a depression when you lose yours.” And while economic

experts may tell us that the current recession ended in June 2009,

for almost 15 million Americans, this is still a depression.According to the

September 2010 report of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of

Labor Statistics, 14.8 million people were unemployed in this

country, an unemployment rate of 9.6 percent. That’s about the same

as the unemployment rate for August, and down from the high of 10 ...

On the afternoon

of September 30, a fire destroyed Gene Cranick's home in Obion

County, Tennessee. The fire department was on-hand before the fire

became un-controllable, but didn't move to extinguish it. It turns

out, firefighters arrived because Mr. Cranick's neighbor paid

his annual rural fire service fee guaranteeing his home

protection. Mr. Cranick had not.Obion County has

no fire fighting service for rural areas. The closest fire

department, South Fulton, is barely kept afloat by city taxes and

does not have the funds to extend its service to county residents

living in rural areas – unless ...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “deficit” to mean “a deficiency in amount or quality.” When it comes to the federal budget “deficit,” it’s specifically about the amount of money in the U.S. Treasury.Each year, money comes into the Treasury as revenues from such things as individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, estate taxes, gift taxes, customs tariffs on imported goods, and excise taxes. The government then spends money on a vast array of federal programs — education, housing assistance, job training, the military, healthcare, and entitlement programs like Social Security and unemployment benefits ...

In the last couple of years it's become strikingly clear that the majority of people in the United States do not know where or how their federal tax dollars are spent. As a result, they feel disengaged from both the personal and societal impacts of federal spending and believe they receive little benefit from and have little influence over the creation or oversight of our nation's budget.

The absence of clear information about U.S. federal spending and its local impact has helped erode democratic participation. NPP believes that the federal budgeting process is meant to be participatory ...

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPAC). In tandem with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, ratified a week later to amend portions of the PPAC, these two pieces of legislation represent the passage of significant pieces of health care reform. Most notably, the new laws expand health care coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans.

The current debate surrounding PPAC has three central voices: those who assert they are fixing a broken system, others who see the legislation as a direct, costly, and unconstitutional attack against the individual liberties ...

On June 26, 2009 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) to address the role of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in perpetuating climate change. Most notably, the bill features a 'cap and trade' initiative to set the total volume of greenhouse gas emissions at a predetermined level, and a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) mandating large, state utility companies produce an increasing percentage of electricity from renewables (i.e. 17% below 2005 levels by 2020). Though multiple bills addressing similar concerns have been drafted in the Senate none have made it to the floor ...

The U.S. Census Bureau released a report showing a significant decrease in U.S. economic security, tied to a rise in unemployment, between 2008 and 2009. The report highlights trends in median income, poverty and health insurance coverage during this time frame.NPP's Income Security and Labor provide a powerful context for the report's major findings, including:The U.S. poverty rate in 2009 rose to 14.3% from 13.2% in 2008. In 2009, 43.6 million Americans – or one in seven – lived in poverty, up from 39.8 million the prior year. The Bureau notes ...

On March 13, 2010 the Obama Administration released its blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known widely now by its most recent reincarnation, the Bush Administration's “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB). ESEA mandates that an increased proportion of the education budget be allocated towards programs first introduced through the Recovery Act, most notably the Race to the Top program and the Investing in Innovation Fund.The current debate surrounding ESEA – in part – rests on the question of whether or not the act is a large enough departure from its 2001 predecessor, NCLB. Criticized as ...