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 ...