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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 – ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...