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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 – ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...