Obama Budget on The Huffington Post

Rajeev Goyal: What Happened to the Promise of 16,000 Peace Corps Volunteers by 2011?

2009-12-03T22:39:16Z

Dear President Obama,

There was a time when the Peace Corps was just an idea. Today it is a force -- far more than a gesture of good will. Since 1961, over 60,000 volunteers in Africa, for instance, have made immeasurable contributions in fighting HIV/AIDS, bringing potable water access and food stability to African villages, protecting the environment, and teaching millions of African children to read and write. Volunteers, who are not symbols of status, are America's best ambassadors.

During your Presidential campaign, you pledged to double the number of Peace Corps volunteers to 16,000 by 2011. But you did not provide the funding in your fiscal year 2010 budget. As you know, fiscal year 2010 is the budget which will determine how many volunteers serve in 2011. Your budget increase, $34 million, would add a few hundred volunteers (but not the 8,400 needed to reach 16,000). The House of Representatives acted to correct this oversight by increasing funds to the Peace Corps by $110 million, a historic increase that would bring the budget to $450 million.

We write today to ask you, Mr. President, to speak to Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Nita Lowey, who chair the Senate and House State/Foreign Operations subcommittees, to pass the House mark for Peace Corps.

Today, you will be shocked to know that the Corps is half the size it was in 1966.

The cost of gas has gone up nine times since 1966, but the Peace Corps budget has only tripled (from $105 million to $340 million).

But the clearest proof of the enduring vitality of the Peace Corps mission is the demand. Over 20 nations want Peace Corps programs and applications have increased by 35% to 15,386 in 2009. It remains one of the strongest brand names in the world, an iconic symbol of hope and moral courage.

But in 2009, 500 trainee positions were cut. As demand soars, positions are being lost.

At a time when the job market is difficult and people are struggling to find jobs or even internships or volunteer opportunities, why are we cutting the number of Peace Corps volunteers? But this situation can be corrected with your help.

It would take just one call from you.

Yesterday, you pledged an additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan. This will cost America $30 billion. The amount of money we need for the Peace Corps is $110 million - less than .01% of the cost of the 30,000 soldiers.

From 1962 to 1979, 1,652 men and women served in Afghanistan but today there is not a single Peace Corps volunteer in South Asia.

Not one among the 1.5 billion people of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

What we are asking would take just a few minutes.

Senator Patrick Leahy is a champion of the Peace Corps, a believer in its mission and he is helping build a bigger, better, bolder Peace Corps, but he already has in his State/Foreign Operations bill the full amount you requested - $374 million.

Sen. Leahy's bill has millions of dollars less to work with than the House of Representatives version, but he is still trying to help and is coming up as best he can. He needs to hear from you about your support for the House figure.

In 2011, the world will celebrate 50 years of Peace Corps. This will be a spotlight moment when millions will learn more about what it is, what volunteers have done since, and how to apply -- applications could come pouring in and the funding crisis for Peace Corps could deepen. Inspired by the legendary stories of Directors Sargent Shriver and Jack Vaughan, thousands more will apply, young and old. Peace Corps will undergo a renaissance. This budget, which will be decided in days, is therefore even more critical.

Congressman Sam Farr (Colombia 64-66), has been our leader. He was super-delegate who was promised that you would double the Peace Corps by 2011 (he requested you to triple). Thanks to his efforts, one hundred thirty-two Members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, are on his bill, the Peace Corps Expansion Act 2009. It calls for $450, $600, and $750 million in fiscal years 2010, 2011, and 2012. Senator Dodd's Bill, which has 13 co-sponsors, also has $450 million for FY 2010.

Many of the least developed nations in Africa have no Peace Corps workers today. We can change that. You can change that.

These are nations ravaged by HIV/AIDS like Central African Republic, Eritrea, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Guinea-Bissau. The average lifespan in Zimbabwe is 37 for women, 34 for men. There is poverty in these nations that we cannot even imagine. But brave Peace Corps volunteers are trying to help.

Many of the existing Peace Corps programs have far too few volunteers. For example, there are just 11 in Madagascar, 28 in Georgia, 54 volunteers in all of Mexico, 72 in Cambodia, and 30 in Jordan.

Thank you for nominating an outstanding new Peace Corps Director, Aaron Williams (DR 66-69). Director Williams, who managed a billion-dollar program in South Africa for USAID and twice received the Distinguished Service Medal, is the visionary leader we needed to build the 16,000-volunteer Peace Corps. Thank you so much.

I know that each day you read a handful of letters from people in America. I hope you read ours today. I hope you call Senator Leahy about the Peace Corps this weekend. I hope you include $600 million for fiscal year 2011 - the budget in Congressman Farr's Bill, which already has 132 co-sponsors.

Thank you so much, Mr. President. We are grateful for anything you can do. If you cannot help now, then please provide at least $600 million in fiscal year 2011 for sure.

I would like to end with a quote.

"To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it."

This was not President John F. Kennedy in 1961 but you, President Obama, in 2009.

Sincerely,

Rajeev Goyal
Peace Corps Volunteer/Nepal 01-03

Andy Ostroy: Hey Republicans, Can You Answer These Questions Truthfully About the "Obama Economy?"

2009-07-21T09:06:37Z

The Republican party's love affair with former President Ronald Reagan took on Mark Sanford-like Argentinian proportions after eight miserable years of George Bush. To conservatives today, Reagan is God. To Democrats, he's an overrated myth who tripled the deficit and doesn't deserve the hype. But, he was a masterful politician who brilliantly asked Americans during a 1980 televised debate with then-incumbent Jimmy Carter, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The rest is campaign history.

With the country still reeling from the impact of the worst financial crisis not seen in 80 years, perhaps it's time that that other masterful politician, President Barack Obama, defend his nascent administration's fiscal policies by revisiting and re-phrasing that legendary question: Is the economy stronger now than when Bush left office? It's a really simple question, and one that cuts right through the rampant partisan rhetoric polluting the airwaves today.

So here's a little test for our Republican friends to help them decide the status of the nation's economy. I dare them to answer these questions truthfully, as Americans first, and not as transparent partisan stooges:

1. Is the stock market stronger today than when Bush left office?
2. Is the banking industry stronger than when Bush left office?
3. Are Wall Street companies (JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, etc) doing better today than when Bush left office?
4. Are the credit markets doing better than when Bush left office?
5. Is the auto industry doing better than when Bush left office?
6. Are the housing markets doing better than when Bush left office?
7. Are retailers doing better than when Bush left office?
8. Is the technology industry doing better than when Bush left office?
0. Are monthly jobless claims lower than when Bush left office?
10. Is consumer confidence higher than when Bush left office?

Of course, the answer to every single one of these black and white questions is yes. Conclusion? It's abundantly clear that President Obama's stewardship of the economy has resulted in tremendous improvement from the near-abyss the nation fell into last Fall at the end of Bush's presidency. While Republicans can vehemently criticize Obama's stimulus plan and disingenuously declare its failure all they want, the facts speak for themselves.

Nice work, President Obama. Keep it up. While Republicans may never thank you, their businesses, jobs, homes and savings will.

Marshall Auerback: Risk of Major Social Upheaval Likely if Bank Bonanza Continues

2009-06-25T17:05:43Z

State and local governments have been forced into draconian budget cuts, firing workers who are among the most reliable in making their mortgage payments -- when they have jobs: firemen, policemen, teachers, civil servants.

Yet the Obama administration won't spend even a small fraction of what it has wasted on the banks to cover state shortfalls. The guarantee of $5.5bn in short term notes for California was deemed to be fiscally irresponsible, yet hundreds of billions have already been allocated to the likes of Citigroup, AIG, and Goldman Sachs, all of whom have already beefed up salaries and bonuses as they emerge from the embrace of the federal government.

Good for the banks, bad for the economy

Banks are also benefiting from lending programs that effectively allow them to borrow at zero and reinvest in Treasuries at around 3%. A bank doesn't have to do anything to make money. The banks' return on equity is going to be very good. They are going to be able to restore their finances.

While this is good for banks, is it good for anyone else? The problem is the government's "free money" program means banks have little or no incentive to do any actual lending. Combined with rising unemployment and the ongoing housing crisis, this means any recovery is likely to be muted, at best, especially given the ongoing weakness in the real estate market. Growing income inequality will likely be perpetuated and exacerbated with all of the resultant social strains. And in the meantime, the siren songs will grow that we are a nation addicted to debt, deficit spending our way to economic disaster.

Housing bubble lessons

Policy makers were slow to recognize the importance and magnitude of home price deflation. Keynes, Minsky, and Fisher understood that balance sheets matter to income and cash flow outcomes -- it is not just the other way around, as convention has it, where income and cash flow results passively accumulate on balance sheets at a glacial pace.

The New Keynesians like Bernanke should have recognized this through their "financial accelerator" channels approach, but the near-ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) QE (quantitative easing) approaches have so far proven to be too little, too late. Moreover, there is now a wing of investors feeding fears that "monetization" and significant fiscal expansion may constrain the Treasury's room to manoeuvre further. The upshot is that we have missed a golden opportunity to deal with the growing problem of income inequality. Instead, we have the paradoxical spectacle of an ostensibly progressive Democrat administration, and a Democratically controlled Congress, presiding over one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history.

As Keynes and Minsky realized a lifetime ago, durable asset markets, such as housing, do not clear as easily as markets for Chiquita bananas. This is especially true after asset bubbles have introduced structural excesses in parts of the capital stock -- what the Austrians call "malinvestment" or distortions to the production structure. When there are large outstanding stocks of durable assets relative to the potential flow supply, lower prices are not necessarily the cure for low prices, as the traders in the Chicago pits are wont to assert. The bias toward viewing markets as self-regulating, self-adjusting mechanisms does not hold equally well across all markets in all conditions, as this generation has been brainwashed to believe.

Rather, lower prices can beget a stock overhang of existing owners who want to sell, especially if expectations about "normal" or future values are closely coupled with recent spot price trends. Following an asset bubble, when conventions about normal supply prices (or even legitimate valuation models in general) have been ruptured, recent price momentum does tend to become the main guide to expectations, as the trend extrapolating traders win the day against fundamental driven investors during asset bubbles.

Obama, Geithner, and Summers misguided

Obama, Geithner, and Summers misplaced their faith in lower prices as the cure to an excess supply situation in a durable asset market. They also they failed to understand that while lower spot prices may reduce new production, the desired selling out of existing stocks can swamp this flow supply reduction. Because of these misconceptions, they now think they face the choice of either having to let it all meltdown, or else using policy to synthetically reproduce the prior bubble credit conditions.

Or consider this analysis another way, from the increasingly prevailing view that US policy makers are somehow edging us toward a hyperinflationary abyss. Money created has to be spent on goods and services to get higher product prices. Professional investors are working with very simple quantity theory approaches. They are not thinking about transmission mechanisms from money to prices. There is no auction market for M1 and the CPI that automatically settles at the end of each day. The only auction market is spending by public and private sectors on produced goods and services each day, week, month, quarter or year.

Government is the only one increasing spending. The fact that nominal GDP is still falling tells us that the private sector is trying to save more than government is deficit spending, which is deflationary, not inflationary. Even arch monetarists such as Milton Friedman conceded that the path to inflation from money creation was through nominal GDP.

In an inflation, people are eager to trade money holdings for produced goods and services or tangible assets. In a hyperinflation, even more so.

That is not what we have today. Banks are hoarding $1 trillion of cash on their balance sheets. Companies are in cash conservation mode and stripping down inventories, headcounts, and reducing capital spending. Households are saving and building exposure to near cash instruments.

Robust stimulus needed

When an economy experiences sharp and sustained shifts in private liquidity preferences, the policy response must be to create money and additional aggregate demand via government fiscal stimulus, or let debt deflation rip. The latter tends not to be terribly acceptable to democracies for the obvious reasons which Fisher had to learn first hand.

Statements by President Obama that "we are out of money" do not help, because they imply that there is an operational constraint on fiscal policy, beyond which the government dare not go. They feed the prevailing paradigm about "debt sustainability" and "national solvency" and thereby work at cross purposes. What President Obama, Fed Chairman Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Geithner must say is that until the government deficit spending and the improvement in the trade balance exceeds desired net private sector saving, we can create all the money we want - it simply will not be enough to driver final product prices higher unless and until we succeed in restoring aggregate demand to sufficiently high credible levels where a self-sustaining economic recovery can take place.

In one sense, it is pointless blaming Wall Street for exploiting a system heavily rigged in its favour. They know that the game is stacked in their favour, so they are rationally taking advantage. But the sickest part about the whole episode is that the casino rule makers, Obama, Geithner and Summers, are perpetuating a flawed game that they had in their power the chance to end. In my more cynical moments, I have to wonder why TARP, which is essentially a purchase of financial assets (and, hence, better left in the hands of the Fed, as Treasury is supposed to buy 'real things') was placed in the hands of Treasury. It's almost as if this was planned deliberately so as to provide the anti-government folks with a cudgel with which to beat back supporters of activist government. My issue with Obama and his fiscal package is the same as Rob Johnson's: taxpayer money is being deployed in hugely inefficient ways like Citi, BofA, AIG, and GM and discrediting fiscal policy in the process. Contrast this with the achievements of the New Deal. As Adam Cohen in his new book, Nothing to Fear.

"[WPA] workers constructed or repaired more than 125,000 buildings, including 83,000 schools; 800 aiports; 950 sewage plants; and 650,000 miles of roads. They built or improved 78,000 bridges and 25,000 playgrounds; terraced 271,000 acres of eroded land; and taught two million people to read. They also ran a famous Federal Art Project, which hired destitute artists to create murals for public buildings, posters, and paintings. The WPA produced a highly regarded series of state guidebooks and an acclaimed collection of interviews with former slaves, and it played a major role in building the San Antonio Zoo, New York City's LaGuardia and Washington's Reagan airports, and the presidential retreat at Camp David. In 1965, on the program's thirtieth anniversary, The New York Times quoted a dispossessed North Carolina tenant farmer living in an abandoned gas station, who had been rescued by a WPA job. 'I'm proud of our United States, and everyting I hear The Star Spangled Banner I feel a lump in my throat,' he said. 'There ain't no other nation in the world that would have had the sense enough to think of WPA."

This kind of puts the paucity of Obama's fiscal goals in stark relief, doesn't it?

The key is building a political case for the stimulus. This means getting people around a common objective where everybody is perceived to be benefiting and that the sacrifices are being borne fairly. This was clearly the situation in WWII when the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP got as high as 30.3% of GDP, yet nobody complained about the "sustainability" of government expenditures. The upshot was that by 1946, the GDP per capita was 25 percent higher than it had been in the last peace years before the War. GDP per capita continued to grow during the Marshall Plan years. Despite giving away two percent of U.S. GDP, American residents (and taxpayers) experienced a higher standard of living each year. And nobody spoke about us running out of money.

Bank bonanza must end

By contrast, the current bonanza for banks is neither economically efficient, nor politically sustainable.

What is driving the change in portfolio preference shifts is not only a misguided paradigm, but also an inability for the Obama administration to make a sensible, coherent case in what they are doing and why they are doing it. Their actions, in fact, seem to suggest that everything is ad hoc and that they are operating out of their depth, in effect continuing the same policies of the Bush/Paulson period, but on a much greater scale.

Ironically, this ultimately will also prove highly inimical to the interests of finance itself. When most of the home owning voters cannot pay their major debt or have no incentive to pay their mortgage debt, there will either be a debtors revolt that society will sanction or there will be a bailout of such a magnitude that mega moral hazard will affect private lending forever. Once these things happen, you will no longer have the social rules for private risk based lending. In other words, financial markets will be unlike anything ever seen before in private economies. Is this really what Wall Street wants, let alone American society as a whole?

Both FDR and JFK had a brain trust that could help forge public opinion. Obama has his halo, Geithner, and Summers. We've known from the start that was a misstep.

In the meantime, beyond automatic stabilizers, the door appears to be shutting to further active fiscal ease. I wonder if the stage is already being set for tax hikes, as rumors of a federal VAT (value added tax) have been floating around of late. Add this to rising commodity prices and interest rates, and the profile of any recovery may become increasingly in question, a la 1937-8. Add to that additional bank write-offs, further credit contraction and a minimalist welfare system which leaves nothing in the way of social cohesion, and the prospects for major social upheaval look dangerously likely. What is missing is a vision of a new growth path for the US. If a public backlash is to be marshalled to something more than retribution, that needs to come to the fore. Once you get beyond the pothole and school patching, what industries can be pushed forward through public seed capital or public private partnerships? The economist Hy Minsky pointed out a better way to solve both the liquidity and the income problem, while also providing full employment: by channeling government expenditure through an employer-of-last-resort program.

The current crisis could have been mitigated if increased household consumption had been financed through wage increases and if financial institutions had used their earnings to augment bank capital rather than employee bonuses.

The current system has failed because it was built on an incentive system that did just the opposite.

This piece was originally posted on New Deal 2.0

Obama Wants $475 Million For Great Lakes Cleanup

2009-05-15T18:52:09Z

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — A budget proposal from the Obama administration would spend $475 million on beach cleanups, wetlands restoration and removal of toxic sediments from river bottoms around the Great Lakes.

The spending represents a first step toward a multiyear campaign to repair decades of damage to the battered ecosystem. It also seeks to ward off new threats by preventing exotic species invasions and cutting down on erosion and runoff.

Norm Stamper: New Drug Czar: "We're Not at War With People in This Country"

2009-05-14T16:58:47Z

Gil Kerlikowske, the president's new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, scored big points when he told the Wall Street Journal he wants to put an end to the "war on drugs." Which he daringly described as a war on people.

Of course, banishing a phrase amounts to a hollow gesture if it's not backed by deeds. President Truman insisted on calling the military conflict in Korea a "police action" but I'm guessing it felt pretty much like war to its casualties and survivors.

So, in retiring the phrase from the federal lexicon will we really be ending the "War on Drugs"? Hardly. We can reasonably expect in the face of Kerlikowske's pronouncement, an expression of shock and a circling of the wagons from key institutional forces, from frontline drug warriors to profiteering drug traffickers; from well-meaning but naïve PTAs to patronizing, fear-mongering politicians; from Big Pharma to the prison industrial complex. There's just too much at stake, financially and ideologically, to end this remarkably divisive and durable war.

Is the Obama administration serious about implementing drug policy reform? We all know the significance of a presidential budget. It's essentially dollars and cents representing policies and priorities. What does the administration's "National Drug Control Budget" tell us about the Obama approach to drug issues?

In the 2010 budget, prevention takes a 10.6 percent hit while domestic law enforcement gets a boost of 2.3 percent, with "interdiction" (military and police actions designed to stem the flow of drugs into and about the country) gaining 4.4 percent. On the positive side of the ledger, treatment shows a 4.4 percent increase. And what of the never-ending seesaw battle between supply and demand initiatives? Unfortunately, demand reduction efforts (education, prevention) are down 0.8 percent, while (generally futile) supply reduction initiatives (enforcement, burning or poisoning crops) gets a 2.7 percent bump.

Still, it's way too early to dismiss the Obama/Biden/Kerlikowske approach as just so much smoke and mirrors. The country is a-rumble with signs of change. In his confirmation hearing, Kerlikowske came out in strong support of needle exchange programs as part of an overall public health approach, a position he affirmed in the WSJ interview. The new government's putative hands-off policy on DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries is most encouraging, especially in light of the Bush administration's punitive, heavy-handed tactics. And there's been an early, unmistakable shift in rhetoric from an enforcement orientation to one favoring treatment of drug offenders.

Drug policy reformers of every stripe are abuzz. They recognize, after lo these many decades that agitation for reform is multiplying exponentially at both the state and federal levels. The prospect of real change is palpable.

Which means the many and varied special-interest proponents of the drug war (which has been very, very good to them) will fortify their positions, enrich their treasuries, and emit a sustained howl of protest.

Which means this is precisely the time that reform activists must step up the pace, adding fresh energy, dollars, and creativity to the campaign for sane and humane drug laws.

White House Abstinence Funding May Be Provided After All

2009-05-12T14:24:24Z

Although President Obama cut funding for abstinence-only sex education from his new budget, a White House official said Tuesday that some programs could eventually receive government money.

Obama Budget Bans Federal Funding For Needle Exchange, Breaking Campaign Pledge

2009-05-07T19:15:25Z

President Obama's budget released Thursday takes a step backward from a controversial political position he had taken during the presidential campaign.

Obama, during the primary campaign, pledged his support of needle exchange programs to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS. When he took over the White House, the administration website affirmed: "The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users."

Yet Obama's budget includes language that bans spending federal money on needle-exchange programs.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the administration isn't yet ready to lift the ban - but Obama still supports needle exchange.

"We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change," he said. "We are committed to doing this as part of a National HIV/AIDS strategy and are confident that we can build support for these scientifically-based programs."

He added, "In recent years, Washington has used the budget process to litigate divisive issues and score political points. This practice, which both sides have engaged in, has limited our ability to tackle our major economic challenges. President Obama decided not to play politics as usual with this budget and while he remains committed to supporting the program he wants to address that through the normal legislative process."

The White House website no longer features the president's support of the program, however. See the before and after here.

"It's hard to imagine how removing mention of support for a proven lifesaving program from the White House website is part of a grand strategy to 'build support' for syringe exchange," said Tom Angell, a spokesman for the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Obama's budget also includes a provision known as the "Barr Amendment," which prevents the District of Columbia from implementing a medical marijuana law that voters passed in an overwhelming referendum. Obama has pledged not to use Department of Justice resources to raid medical marijuana clinics in states where it is legal.

UPDATE: The Center for Global Health Policy writes in, noting that Obama also underfunded the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which funds a wide variety of prevention efforts, including needle exchange in Eastern Europe, where drug addiction and HIV/AIDS rates are both soaring:

Another major disappointment for global health advocates is the Obama proposal for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Countries rely on the Fund, in particular, for funding for tuberculosis programs, and so far the Fund has also provided over $600 million for health system strengthening. The Global Fund requested $2.7 billion from the US for 2010, but the Administration is proposing only $900 million, the same level as 2009. Unless Congress goes above the Administration's proposal, the US will miss a major opportunity to use the Fund to leverage more donations from Spain, Germany, and other countries, and AIDS, TB and malaria programs will be stalled.

Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

Paul Helmke: Obama Administration Fails to Remove Gun Lobby Language from Budget

2009-05-07T16:18:00Z

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is profoundly disappointed that President Obama has failed to follow through with his promises for 'openness' by reaffirming much of the so-called Tiahrt Amendments.

This means a continuation of the reckless Bush-era policies that endanger public safety and make it easier for criminals to obtain illegal firearms.

President Obama's proposal undermines the landmark Brady Law by continuing the dangerous Bush administration policy requiring the destruction of most Brady background check records in just 24 hours.

The government has found that this policy has allowed guns to remain in the hands of hundreds of criminals whose gun purchases were mistakenly approved. How can the president reconcile this policy with his recent statement calling for stronger enforcement of our gun laws?

President Obama continues to bar the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from requiring that gun dealers keep track of their firearms by conducting annual inventories -- a standard practice for law-abiding businesses.

A Brady Center analysis last year found that more than 30,000 guns were "missing" from licensed gun dealers. Gun dealers who have large numbers of guns "disappear" from their inventory often supply criminals. The D.C.-area snipers killed 10 people using an assault rifle they obtained from a gun shop that "lost" at least 238 guns, including the snipers' assault rifle, over a three year period.

In addition, President Obama has made the Tiahrt Amendments' unprecedented ban on public disclosure of crime gun trace information even worse than before, now even prohibiting law enforcement from communicating it to the public it serves.

Prior to 2003, non-confidential trace data was available to researchers, public officials, the media and the public, and enabled all of us to better understand the sources of illegal guns, patterns of gun trafficking, the role of gun dealers in supplying the illegal market and other key facts informing public policy.

With gun violence continuing to lead to high levels of death and injury in so many places in our country, policy makers need more, not less, information on the sources of these crime guns. We are saddened to see this "gun exception" to the president's stated commitment to "an unprecedented level of openness in Government."

The Tiahrt Amendments have always been about pleasing a special interest lobby at the expense of public safety. Congress should delete the proposed language and do what the Obama-Biden ticket called for last year when their campaign said they 'would repeal the Tiahrt amendment.'

Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.

Dr. Seth Berkley: Science for Us, but Also for the World

2009-05-07T15:44:24Z

Earlier this week, President Obama proposed a $63 billion, six-year global health initiative to address diseases in the developing world, so as to both protect Americans from health challenges that emerge from abroad and to support the dignity of people everywhere. This announcement came on the heels of his inspiring speech at the National Academy of Sciences, where he laid out how he planned to implement his inauguration day promise to "restore science to its rightful place" in the administration's domestic policies. I suggest there ought to be a connection between these two ideas: that the Obama administration should extend its fervor for science to its foreign aid policy, putting science and technology at the heart of U.S. assistance to the developing world.

As the President pointed out in his National Academy of Sciences speech, by a number of measures, U.S. support for science has flagged. Still, this country remains by far the world leader in scientific research and development. It is home to three quarters of the world's top 40 universities and is responsible for 40 percent of the total global funding for R&D. And now the President plans to dedicate 3% of the nation's gross domestic product to R&D.

Our R&D prowess should be the cornerstone of our foreign aid policy. We have much of this resource to share, even in recession. And it is needed. No country in the post-colonial era has thrived without first building its capacity to conduct scientific research. Japan and Singapore systematically harnessed science to become technological powerhouses, and the emerging economies of China and India are doing the same today.

But how, precisely, might science be better deployed in the service of foreign aid?

We could, for one thing, support the adaptation of existing technologies--from water-pumps to seed stocks to power sources--to address the immediate needs of the world's poor. If you're looking for an example of how this might work, consider the LifeWrap, a pressure device that resembles a wetsuit in pieces and was, in an older form, used to stabilize severely injured soldiers during the Vietnam War. Refined by NASA scientists in the 1990s, it was adapted by a Stanford University obstetrician who recognized its promise for stabilizing women bleeding heavily after childbirth. Obstetric hemorrhage is a leading cause of death for women in developing countries, where access to ambulances and quick trips to hospitals is often scarce. With a little training, the LifeWrap can be used by almost anybody. It has been field-tested by the University of California at San Francisco's Safe Motherhood Programs, which is further evaluating the device in Zambia and Zimbabwe and has already deployed it in Nigeria and India. Imagine how many more such innovations we might dig up if we just gave American scientists and engineers incentive to focus deliberately on the diseases and challenges of poverty.

Of course, such stopgap measures aren't likely to deliver adequate health care services or drive innovation on the scale required to rejuvenate national economies. That can only be accomplished by the thoughtful cultivation of scientific and technical capacity in developing countries.

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, of which I am a part, has some experience in this kind of work. To enable the clinical evaluation of a series of candidate AIDS vaccines, we have supported the construction of laboratories and clinics at research centers with which we collaborate in five countries of sub-Saharan Africa. We have helped to train local scientists, technicians and counselors at these facilities to conduct research at the highest of international standards. These skills and resources are indispensible to the fulfillment of our long-term mission to develop an affordable and effective AIDS vaccine. But the scientific capacity generated by our collaboration has benefits that reach far beyond our organizational objectives. We have helped to establish a regional network of sophisticated laboratories staffed with top-notch researchers that may now be harnessed to find home-grown solutions to some of the region's countless medical challenges.

We are not by any means alone in our capacity-building work. Some 35 percent of the money disbursed by the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, for example, goes directly into developing human resources, infrastructure and disease-monitoring capabilities. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for its part, has been an enthusiastic supporter of our efforts to develop the lab network. If science and technology were more deeply incorporated into the fabric of U.S. foreign aid policy, we have no doubt the agency would be an enthusiastic and capable leader of all such efforts. And, as the President noted in his statement this week, such assistance would, in many cases, ultimately benefit Americans. As demonstrated by the emergence of the Mexican swine flu in the US, infectious diseases have little respect for borders; helping developing countries detect and deal with their diseases is the surest way for us to protect ourselves from new and potentially devastating epidemics.

Jennifer Delaney: World AIDS Orphans Day: Advocates Celebrate Our Progress and Challenge the New U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator

2009-05-07T09:16:32Z

Co-authored by Albina du Boisrouvray

President Obama has nominated a Californian, Eric Goosby, to serve the White House as the Global AIDS Coordinator. As Dr. Goosby embarks on his tremendous mission in Washington, we in the advocacy community warmly welcome him and anticipate working closely together.

Today carries particularly special meaning for the orphans' advocacy community throughout the world, as we recognize World AIDS Orphans' Day. World AIDS Orphans Day is a grassroots campaign to draw attention to and advocate on behalf of the more than 15 million children orphaned by AIDS. Founded by FXB International, World AIDS Orphans Day began as a march on Wall Street in 2002 when activists held signs asking, "What is the value of an orphan on the NY Stock Exchange?"

Though we have made much progress since the launch of World AIDS Orphans Day in 2002, we must recognize that much is left to be done if we are to meet the needs of millions of vulnerable children. The statistics are still overwhelming. Twelve percent of all children in sub-Saharan Africa are orphans. One quarter of them have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS. By 2010, UNAIDS estimates that there will be 15.7 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa -- according to various reports coming out of Russia and China, the global figure of AIDS orphans is potentially far higher. Worldwide, approximately 2.3 million children under age 15 currently live with HIV. Less than five percent of these HIV-positive children receive the anti-retroviral medicines they need.

Last year, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was reauthorized by Congress along with TB and malaria programs with an unparalleled funding level of $48 billion, including over $3 billion dollars to care for kids in extreme poverty. Yet, the Global Health Plan budget released yesterday by the Obama administration does not to keep up with the progressive pace that Congress laid out only eight months ago. The global economic recession has forced many American policymakers to worry exclusively about American problems. Additionally, the recent struggles in Congress' budget resolution to fully fund the 150 Account, which is responsible for all foreign aid, can be interpreted as a warning that there will be future fights over the cost of lifesaving foreign aid programs.

But what would be the cost of our inaction? Focusing on family and community is not just about dollars and cents; it also makes practical sense. We need to recognize that there are multiple social and economic costs that follow a society's failure to address the needs of their most vulnerable members -- children. The cost of failure is simply too high to leave the future parents and leaders of our world behind. We cannot allow the littlest victims with limited social protection to fall through the cracks of this epidemic, and and succumb to malnutrition, lack of education, and protection, or worse fate such as sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, or child soldiering. This is not only devastating for them, but for to future stability, and prosperity of our global future. We are already seeing the cost of inaction in Somalia, Northern Uganda and areas of other nations where social systems have broken down and pandemics and lawlessness have taken over.

We are eager to work with Dr. Goosby, a local San Franciscan and long time HIV/AIDS physician and activist. As the Global AIDS Coordinator, Dr. Goosby will be charged with leading our US efforts to fight HIV/AIDS in the hardest hit countries worldwide and he will face the challenge of pushing for full funding of the Congressionally authorized levels for HIV/AIDS. Dr. Goosby should know we expect him to be a fierce advocate for life saving HIV/AIDS and OVC programs; and he should expect our tireless support in return.

Albina du Boisrouvray, Founder and President of Association François-Xavier Bagnoud [FXB International]. Jennifer Delaney, Executive Director and President of the Board of Directors of Global Action for Children

Obama Budget Cuts Announced: $17 Billion (LIVE VIDEO)

2009-05-07T07:45:02Z

WASHINGTON — In twin strokes, President Barack Obama is calling on Congress to award generous budget increases to domestic programs while proposing relatively modest cuts to wasteful or obsolete programs.

Officials said Wednesday that Obama's promised line-by-line scrub of the federal budget had produced a roster of 121 budget cuts totaling $17 billion _ or about one-half of 1 percent of the $3.4 trillion budget Congress has approved for next year. President Obama is unveiling the details Thursday.

WATCH PRESIDENT OBAMA DISCUSS HIS BUDGET PLANS AT 10:35 EST:

White House budget director Peter Orszag said the president's plan for program cuts is just a start and that a lot more needs to be done to dig the government out of its fiscal hole, especially curbing the growth of the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs for the elderly and the poor.

"But $17 billion a year is not chump change by anyone's accounting," Orszag said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

Those savings are far exceeded by a phone-book-sized volume detailing Obama's generous increases for domestic programs that will accompany the call for cuts.

Most of the major elements of Obama's budget for next year were released in February. Additional details were coming out Thursday and next week.

The roster of cuts won't be easy for Congress to swallow. Lawmakers from the potent California, New York and Florida delegations are sure to fight the elimination of the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which gives money to states to help defray the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants who commit crimes. President George W. Bush tried and failed to kill the $400 million program several times.

About half the budget savings would come from an effort by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to curb defense programs, including ending production of the F-22 fighter and killing a much-maligned replacement helicopter fleet for the president.

Budget Director Peter Orszag briefed Democratic lawmakers on a partial roster of the cuts Wednesday. Obama also is fleshing out the details of the $1.3 trillion portion of the budget that he requested Congress pass through appropriations bills for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.

And just as Congress is beginning work on a new war bill to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into the fall, Obama is sending up a $130 billion request to fund them next year. That figure may not be adequate considering the increase in the tempo of operations in Afghanistan.

Obama has said repeatedly his administration will go through the budget "line by line" to eliminate waste. But the resulting savings are relatively minor compared with the government's fiscal woes, especially a deficit that's likely to exceed $1.5 trillion this year.

Administration and congressional officials described elements of the budget proposals only on condition of anonymity to discuss them before they're made public.

Republicans weren't impressed with the cuts.

"While we appreciate the newfound attention to saving taxpayer dollars from this administration, we respectfully suggested that we should do far more," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

Many of the cuts mirror those proposed previously by Bush but largely rejected by Congresses controlled by both Republicans and Democrats.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., said Obama's recommendations won't be "universally embraced" but said Congress also would weigh in with savings recommendations of its own to cut spending.

"This is something that's sorely needed," Cardoza said.

In fact, Democrats already have pared about $10 billion from Obama's appropriations requests in passing the $3.4 trillion congressional budget plan last month.

And lawmakers are unlikely to go along with a call to raise _ after 2010 _ per-ticket fees on airline travel to fund airport security programs.

In a preview, administration officials named a few examples Thursday which mostly represented easy-to-pluck targets, like ending the Education Department's attache in Paris, at a savings of $632,000 a year. Another example: the obsolete LORAN-C aircraft navigation system, which still gets $35 million a year despite being made obsolete by the satellite-based Global Positioning System.

In other budget areas, the administration would keep paying for private-school vouchers for about 1,700 children receiving them in Washington, D.C., an administration official said. Obama is proposing $12.2 million for the 2010-11 school year and would like to continue the funding until the kids in the program graduate. He would not allow new students into the program.

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Obama Seeks To Trim 2010 Budget By $17 Billion

2009-05-06T20:35:31Z

WASHINGTON — After a line-by-line scrub of the federal budget, President Barack Obama has signed off on a roster of 121 budget cuts totaling $17 billion _ or about one-half of 1 percent of the $3.4 trillion budget Congress has approved for next year.

Budget Director Peter Orszag briefed Democratic lawmakers on a partial roster of the cuts Wednesday before a public release on Thursday. Obama also is fleshing out the details of the $1.3 trillion portion of the budget that he requested Congress pass through appropriations bills for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.

White House Continues To Fully Support Specter: Gibbs

2009-05-05T15:33:14Z

The Obama White House, to this point, remains untroubled by the opposition of the Democratic Party's newest member, Arlen Specter, to the president's budget, the Employee Free Choice Act, and a public plan for health insurance.

Asked about the Pennsylvania Democrat on Tuesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that Specter continues to enjoy Barack Obama's "full support" and that the administration would do "what's necessary to see him re-elected," despite their divergence on these policies.

"I think Senator Specter said it the day he made his announcement that he's going to make decisions on individual bills, but I think him switching to the Democratic Party was a belief that that's the party that could best serve his constituents," Gibbs said, in response to a question by ABC's Jake Tapper. "We don't get 100 -- we don't generally get 100 percent of any party voting for us, but we'll continue to try."

The White House, of course, can't simply back away from Specter a week after it jubilantly praised his party switch. Vice President Biden played an integral role in securing that defection. But if Specter's political habits continue to be a topic of discussion at the briefing sessions, expect the White House to apply some private pressure to get the Pennsylvanian more in line with the president's prerogatives.

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House Passes Budget With No GOP Votes

2009-04-29T12:04:19Z

WASHINGTON — Democrats in Congress capped President Barack Obama's 100th day in office by advancing a $3.4 trillion federal budget for next year _ a third of it borrowed _ that prevents Republicans from blocking his proposed trillion-dollar expansion of government-provided health care over the next decade.

Wednesday's House and Senate votes to adopt the nonbinding budget blueprint were only a first step toward Obama's goal of providing health care coverage for all Americans. The budget plan for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 sets the parameters for subsequent tax and spending bills expected to boost clean energy programs and student aid and extend many of former President George W. Bush's tax cuts.

Mitchell Bard: Obama's First 100 Days: Restoring the Good Name of the U.S.

2009-04-28T09:48:29Z

The media's obsession with grading Barack Obama's first 100 days in office amuses me. Sure, in calmer times, maybe it was reasonable to look at a new administration after a little more than three months and try and figure out what kind of presidency the country was in for. But even George W. Bush waited until August 2001 to severely limit when federal money could be used to fund stem cell research, planting his flag in the ground as a leader who would try and impose his religious beliefs (and lack of respect for science) on the nation.

But given the situation Obama inherited when he took over the Oval Office in January, the 100 days figure is particularly silly. After all, in 100 days you can't make a human being from scratch, play a baseball season, or even choose an American Idol. But after 100 days, the media wants to know if Obama has been able to clean up the laundry list of ills left to him by Bush. It's not a short menu, either: an unnecessary and damaging war that was launched with no plan for a resolution, a second war that was headed in the wrong direction thanks to Bush's obsession with the unnecessary war, the potential of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the Taliban, an economy hemorrhaging jobs and creating challenging conditions for a big chunk of Americans, a soaring home foreclosure rate, a plummeting stock market (at the time of Obama's inauguration), a severely damaged financial system that was in danger of bringing the world's economy down, a melting planet, an energy policy (or lack thereof) that threatened the country's economy and national security, and a health-care system that allows tens of millions of Americans to go through life with no medical care, just to hit some highlights.

Oh, and Obama is supposed to solve these problems despite the fact that the Republicans, who have enough votes in the Senate to filibuster legislation, are intellectually bankrupt, with no new ideas to offer beyond "less taxes and less regulation," and who have crafted an identity solely based on opposing whatever Obama says or tries to do. (At this point, with the Republicans acting like bratty children, I am waiting for Obama to make use of the playground anti-mimicking trick of employing reverse psychology and announcing that he is in favor of the Republicans disagreeing with his policies, so that the knee-jerk GOP members will support him, just to be contrary.) And, to be fair, it's not like the members of Congress in his own party have always been supportive, often putting their parochial interests in front of Obama's national agenda (the set of ideas that led the American people to vote him into office by a landslide).

So the task awaiting Obama was massive. And yet, there is a rush to decide how he's doing after 100 days. He doesn't even have all his cabinet members in place yet, after all (partially his fault, but partially thanks to the petty delaying tactics of the Republicans).

Personally, while I can't say I have agreed with each and every decision Obama has made since taking office, on the whole, I think what he has accomplished in the first 100 days is remarkable. He ushered a nearly $1 trillion stimulus plan into law in record time, reversed a flood of reactionary Bush executive orders (including on stem cell research), and, in his budget, made clear that he wants priorities such as health care, green energy and education to be addressed. But despite my support for his work, I refuse on principal to give him a grade. It's just not fair. Donnie Walsh gets two years to revive the Knicks, but the president only gets 100 days to fix the country? (Granted, after Isiah Thomas gets done with an organization, it is a miracle if it still exists at all.)

But there is one area in which Obama has made such a dent in an awful Bush legacy, I will make an exception to my rule and hand out a grade. And it wasn't even an item on my list of debacles Obama inherited from Bush. But, in a way, it encompasses all of these items.

For all of the failures, embarrassments and acts of destruction of the Bush administration, in some ways, none was worse than the damage he did to the American identity. Bush showed utter disregard for the constitution and completely belittled the idea that America stands for justice and due process. And his arrogant attitude toward the world was counterproductive, leaving the United States isolated at a time when it most needed help. Between the invasion of Iraq, the torturing of prisoners, the illegal wiretapping, the outing of a CIA agent, the politicization of the Justice Department, the appointing of incompetent cronies to government positions (like the immortal "Brownie"), the castration of agencies meant to serve the public in an all-encompassing protection of business interests (like the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission testifying to Congress that she opposed funding for more inspectors after it was discovered that toys made in China contained lead paint), and the handing out of government money to businesses in which administration officials had interests (sometimes via no-bid contracts), the Bush administration had tarnished everything that was great about the United States of America. He took a country we could be proud of, a country that strove to meet a higher standard, and tossed us into the gutter. Looking at the pictures from Abu Ghraib or reading the accounts from Guantanamo, it was hard to believe that we were looking at the actions of the U.S. government. That's not the America I was taught about in school.

(As an aside, I am not an end-justifies-the-mean guy, so even if Bush's repugnant policies made us safer, I would object. But we didn't even get that benefit. As we've learned again and again from the men responsible for interrogations, torture doesn't work, and Bush's policies, from the Iraq invasion -- with its human and financial costs -- to Guantanamo, created more terrorists and national security risks than they prevented.)

In his first 100 days, Obama has taken decisive action to show the world that the great side of America, the America that stands for justice and due process, the America that respects the rights of individuals, and the America that has served as an example and destination for people around the world, is trying to come back. Obama's appointments chose competence and expertise over cronyism. He reversed Bush's torture policies and released the completely bogus memos written to justify them. He announced early on that he would close Guantanamo and that we would withdraw from Iraq. He changed the tone of how we speak to our friends and enemies, showing that keeping an open mind is not the same as being weak. He instituted policies that sought to add transparency to government. And, most of all, he showed that he was a smart and competent leader, something that has been absent for the previous eight years.

In the subject area of acting to restore pride in America, I am willing to give Obama a grade: A.

Granted, there have been missteps. He was too slow to embrace the idea of prosecuting those who justified and approved of torture, for example. But when you consider the depths to which Bush had plunged the country in this regard, and the short period of time (the much ballyhooed 100 days) Obama has had to reverse the course of the nation, his achievement in this area has been quick, decisive and productive. He has proven that hope is more than just a poster. Or, as a friend of mine put it, it's nice to know a grown-up is back in charge.

Hopefully when the true final examination comes around in November 2012, and Obama's presidency is evaluated after ample time has gone by for his policies and decisions to be analyzed, he will fare as well. For the sake of the country, I hope he does. But for now, he's off to a pretty good start, even if it is only 100 days.

Obama Repeatedly Reminds House GOP Of Their Zero Stimulus Votes

2009-04-24T15:51:47Z

In a meeting with House Republicans at the White House Thursday, President Obama reminded the minority that the last time he reached out to them, they reacted with zero votes -- twice -- for his stimulus package. And then he reminded them again. And again. And again.

A GOP source familiar with the meeting said that the president was extremely sensitive -- even "thin-skinned" -- to the fact that the stimulus bill received no GOP votes in the House. He continually brought it up throughout the meeting.

Obama also offered payback for that goose egg. A major overhaul of the health care system, he told the Republican leadership, would be done using a legislative process known as reconciliation, meaning that the GOP won't be able to filibuster it.

Congress has until October 15 to pass health care or student lending reform under the normal process. If it doesn't, reconciliation can be used to eliminate the 60-vote requirement.

Democratic aides said that Obama made clear to the GOP leadership that he would continue to work in a bipartisan way, but that they didn't have veto power over health care policy. GOP aides, however, said that Obama was pretty clear that reconciliation would be used. "From what was told me, it sounded more like he would almost definitely use reconciliation for healthcare. I don't think he hedged much," said one.

Another GOP aide said that Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) had a back-and-forth about the zero votes. Obama argued that House Republicans had made a "strategic decision" to oppose the stimulus, while Boehner countered that Obama hadn't accepted House Republican input on the bill.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pushed back against the decision to use reconciliation. "As he told the President during a meeting at the White House on Thursday, Senator McConnell and his colleagues want to be part of the solution to reforming our country's health care system and expects the majority party to include Republicans in that process. Sen. McConnell wants a bipartisan solution," said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart.

"Fast-tracking a major legislative overhaul such as health care reform or a new national energy tax without the benefit of a full and transparent debate does a disservice to the American people," said McConnell in a statement. "And it would make it absolutely clear they intend to carry out their plans on a purely partisan basis."

Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

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Deborah Weinstein: Obama Is on the Right Track When It Comes to Eliminating Government Waste

2009-04-22T16:29:00Z

President Obama's order this week to cut $100 million in administrative costs from federal programs over the next 90 days sends an important message. As the President acknowledged himself, the $100 million is more a tone-setter than a meaningful sum in a federal budget of over $3 trillion. Instead, his words put front and center the longer-term goal of eliminating waste to help reduce the deficit and pay for health care, education, and other programs critical to rebuilding our economy.

The President has already demonstrated a commitment to cut spending as long as needed services aren't compromised. His Administration has proposed:

Eliminating large overpayments to the private insurers that serve some Medicare beneficiaries through the Medicare Advantage program. Cutting these costs, projected at more that $157 billion over the coming decade, would help finance health care reform.
Curtailing the role played by private lenders in administering student loans. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that $94 billion could be saved over 10 years if the government directly provided student loans. President Obama has proposed using the savings to increase Pell grants to low-income students.
Cutting back funding for obsolete or unworkable weapons systems. The Center for American Progress has found that the United States could save $60 billion through such measures as scaling back funding for Cold War-era weapons and ballistic missile defense systems that are not now technically feasible. In the budget proposed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Obama Administration has already begun to take steps in that direction.

Tax loopholes and cuts can be another form of government waste when they give well-off taxpayers a free ride at the expense of the rest of us. A Senate budget proposal to further slash the estate tax, which currently affects no couples with estates worth less than $7 million, would deprive the government of nearly $100 billion over 10 years - revenue that would help defray the cost of much-needed programs and services.

Big oil has also traditionally been a beneficiary of problematic tax policies. An analysis by Friends of the Earth (pdf) found that under Bush Administration policies oil companies stood to gain $33 billion in savings through a variety of tax loopholes over the next five years.

More problem areas could be identified with a better government system for measuring program effectiveness. The Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) put in place by the Bush Administration has been criticized as ineffective. During his confirmation hearing, Peter Orszag, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, said PART focused "too much on process and not enough on outcomes." As one example, he noted that PART evaluates the number of audits the Internal Revenue Service conducts each year, rather than how well the IRS achieves compliance rates. "I'd like to see a system that tells IRS to hit a certain compliance rate in the tax code," Orszag said. "Don't just tell me your audit rate."

The President's budget makes clear choices among alternative uses of scarce resources. He argues that providing health care reform, improving education and creating green jobs benefit the economy more than padded contracts for weapons, private lenders or health insurers. The President is right. He's also right to want to improve administrative efficiency and eliminate enormous tax breaks that do not spur economic growth.

Building a sustainable recovery requires us to use every federal dollar wisely. We must try new approaches, because we know it is possible (and necessary!) to improve the way we deliver health care, educate our children and provide economic security for families. Decisions on whether to continue or expand existing programs - or to scrap them in favor of something new - should be made by taking a close look at whether they are achieving what we need.

Predictably, special interest groups are already lining up in opposition to cuts in everything from student loan administration to subsidy payments for big farmers. If we're serious about doing all we can to support programs that work, we need to make sure that those voices do not drown out the rational calls for an effective and efficient government that will boost our economy and help all Americans.

Deborah Weinstein is executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington, D.C.-based alliance of national organizations working together to promote public policies that address the needs of low-income and other vulnerable populations.

Buddy Winston: Obamanomics

2009-04-11T17:54:06Z

Jim Wallis: Watch and Pray

2009-04-09T13:46:08Z

Last week, before the budget vote, I talked with several senators on the phone as they were about to cast their vote. The ones I spoke to were friends, and I told them that I was praying for them. I said that many of us in the faith community were watching this budget vote very carefully, because it would impact low-income families and vulnerable people in such critical ways. We talked about some of the policy details, the amendments being put forward that could water down or eliminate many of the budget's most important provisions or sources of revenue, and about how hard many of their constituents were being hit by the economic crisis. But at the end of each conversation I would always come back to a promise: "Know that right now across the country, people of faith are watching and praying around this budget." After a slight pause, they each told me that they would vote for this budget and especially would defend the key commitments for struggling families and our poorest people. The senators thanked me for those prayers and ask that they keep coming.

Perhaps the hesitation, that slight pause, that occurred before they thanked me for my prayers and the prayers of so many of you was the realization of what it means when people of faith commit themselves to "watch and pray." Often, "to watch" is thought of as a passive activity that requires little or no effort on the part of the one doing the watching. But that's not how Jesus used the phrase.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane and asked them to stay with him and to watch and pray. He told them that his soul was troubled to the point of death, he prayed to his Father that "the cup would pass," and the scriptures tell us that his sweat was like blood. Three times Jesus left the disciples to pray, and each time when he returned they were sleeping. Jesus told them, "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak." To watch and pray was not the role of a passive observer but an invitation to be an active participant in the scene that was about to unfold. Instead, the disciples fell asleep.

In the black church tradition, "Watch Night" services, which are anything but passive, are held on New Years Eve, a tradition that has its roots in the celebration of "Freedom's Eve" the night before the Emancipation Proclamation began to take effect on January 1, 1863.

It is the act of both watching and praying that allows us to resist temptation and allows the weakness of the flesh to be overcome by the desires of the Spirit. And most insightful legislators will tell you that is a battle they face most every day.

I have often said that a budget is a moral document. Well, after studying this first Obama budget carefully, many of us who have been fighting poverty for years believe this one really is a moral document--with more commitments to struggling families and people than any budget in our lifetimes. But while the president's budget did pass last week, it is far from finished. In fact, this is only the beginning. After a conference committee reconciles the differences between the House and Senate versions, the final budget language will be approved when the members of Congress get back to Washington from their spring break. And then the real work begins. The crucial appropriations process will continue for months with most decisions on the many crucial programs to support low income people yet to be decided. Without continued pressure, without phone calls, letters and e-mails, visits, and conversations with members of the House and Senate, the "temptations" of special interests and the "weakness of the flesh" (Washington's bad habits and priorities) could still block the hopes for the poor in this budget. This is why we need to watch and pray.

While many good steps have been taken in this budget, it is far from complete and we have already seen several key provisions challenged and spending weakened. I have been told by members of the Obama White House team that key provisions for nutrition, child care and early education, the child tax credit, affordable housing, job training, educational opportunity, health care, and vital foreign aid to combat hunger and disease will all be "big fights." Our politics and this budget will revert naturally to old habits and bad priorities, with the poor bearing the brunt, once again, of deficit reduction unless there are powerful, even spiritual, forces pushing better and newer priorities. Now, more than ever, we need to watch and pray.

April 26-29, more than 1,000 Christians from across the country will come to Washington, D.C., to learn, worship, and lobby Congress for a budget that remembers the least of these and pushes forward policies that break the chains of poverty. And we hope President Obama will be speaking to us. I hope you will join us in Washington at the Mobilization to End Poverty to watch and pray.

Over the years we have said time and time again to our elected officials that a budget is a moral document. Now, to each and every one of our fellow Sojourners, I'm saying that your calendar is also a moral document. Each of us, as we are able, is called to commit our time to God's work in this world. More of God's work could be done if this is a good budget for poor families. So I encourage you to join us in person in Washington, or back home to tell your political representatives that you are watching and praying. And keep watching Sojomail and God's Politics blog to keep you informed about when the "big fights" are coming up in Congress.

As people of faith, to watch and pray is never passive but always active, and that is exactly how God has called us to change the world, both outside and inside of politics.

Jim Wallis is the author of The Great Awakening, Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners and blogs at www.godspolitics.com.

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Fox News Chyron Fails Mathematics

2009-04-03T16:06:42Z

OH NOES! Fox News' Chyrons have been all a-chirrup with alarm and outrage over the size of President Barack Obama's budget, which is terrifying and socialist, apparently. Here's what they've been beaming out onto out teevees today:

$3.6 TRIL BUDGET 4X BIGGER THAN BUSH'S COSTLIEST PLAN

Now, I have had some experience with mathematics, up to including some mathematics I took in college. My rigorous academic training teaches me that if this Obama budget is four times larger than the costliest Bush budget, then the costliest Bush budget was $900 billion. I have corroborated these findings with two calculators.

Here's the thing, though.

MSNBC, February 5, 2007:

President Bush sent a $2.9 trillion spending plan to a Democratic-controlled Congress on Monday, proposing a big increase in military spending, including billions more to fight the war in Iraq, while squeezing the rest of government to meet his goal of eliminating the deficit in five years.

Oh. And another thing!

The New York Times, February 4, 2008:

President Bush submitted a federal budget of $3.1 trillion on Monday, declaring that the spending plan would keep the United States safe and prosperous and, despite its record size, would adhere to his principle of letting Americans keep as much of their own money as possible.

So, either the Chyron means to say: OBAMA BUDGET=4X(BUSH'S COSTLIEST BUDGET) where X=0.29032258064516129032258064516129, or Fox News needs to re-enroll in some remedial math classes.

Seriously, though? This ridiculousness is compounded by the fact that the Obama administration has done away with the "dumb budget gimmicks" that the Bush budgets reveled in using to obscure the true costs of some, you know, TOTALLY MINOR EXPENDITURES, like the odd "Iraq War" or "natural disaster" or "massive alternative minimum tax pretenses." As the Times put it:

Mr. Obama's banishment of the gimmicks, which have been widely criticized, is in keeping with his promise to run a more transparent government.

Fiscal sleight of hand has long been a staple of federal budgets, giving rise to phrases like "rosy scenario" and "magic asterisks."

So, maybe the Chyron is missing its magical asterisk!

MORE:
Fox News falsely claimed Obama budget "4x bigger than Bush's costliest plan" [Media Matters]

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
Fox News Chyron Mislabels Dem Strategist As Bush Staffer

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GOP Budget Plan Barely Mentions Education

2009-04-03T14:40:32Z

House Republicans were met with scorn when they first introduced their budget last week because the document they provided contained so little information.

The second effort still lacks specifics in some areas, but this time it's by design. Take education.

The Obama budget offers four pages of details (PDF) on how the administration would fund the Department of Education. The Republican alternative (PDF) unveiled Wednesday, by contrast, mentions the word "education" a mere five times, and only to bash the very concept or cut its funding.

The first instance is a passing reference to the "education bureaucrats" -- lumped in with "industrial policy bureaucrats" and "energy bureaucrats" -- who would benefit under the Democratic plan. The next two come in a list of several items that fall under the broad rubric of "discretionary spending." The document says the budget "provides an ample level of discretionary funding for these programs and operations, while rejecting the irresponsible levels assumed in the Democratic budget resolutions and administration's budget."

That rejection falls on page 35, where the E word pops up in a table denoting $22 billion in cuts via the Committee on Education and Labor. No mention of schools, students, or even No Child Left Behind, the jewel of the Bush administration's education policy and beneficiary of funding boosts proudly announced during Bush's tenure. (Bush didn't love to fund education, but he didn't cut spending on the order of magnitude proposed by current GOP leadership).

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Keith Boykin: Will The Wall Street Journal Apologize To Obama?

2009-04-02T13:55:16Z

One month ago, the Wall Street Journal editorial board complained that President Barack Obama had ruined the economy. As evidence, they cited the decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed at 6763 on March 2.

"The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem," the Journal concluded, as it blamed Obama for the Dow's overall decline of 25 percent in two months. The Journal also attacked Obama's proposed budget. "The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise," the editors wrote.

Never mind the nearly $11 trillion federal debt the president inherited, or the $1.3 trillion deficit, the 8.1 percent unemployment rate, falling home prices and astounding corporate losses. In fact, never mind the recession that started in December 2007. The Journal saw a short-term drop in the stock market and interpreted it as a guilty verdict against a new president who had been in office for just 6 weeks.

But today the news was different. After the Financial Accounting Standards Board revised the rules on "mark to market" accounting this morning, the Dow climbed over 8000, slightly higher than its close at 7949 on Inauguration Day. And this market rally comes on a day with bad economic news on employment.

Will The Journal Apologize?

So what will the Journal say now that the stock market has "rebounded"? Does this mean the market now loves Obama's policies? Will the conservative editorial board credit Obama for the rebound as it blamed him for the decline? And more importantly, will the Journal now apologize to the president?

An apology may be too much to expect, but if nothing else, the Journal should at least acknowledge that presidents should not be judged by short-term swings in the stock market.

First, the president serves a constituency broader than Wall Street. His job is not to cater to wealthy investors but rather to represent the best interests of all Americans, regardless of their portfolio, or absence thereof.

Second, presidents are not entirely responsible for the rise and fall of the market. The editors of the Wall Street Journal should know this. Markets respond to a whole host of factors other than government policy.

But if the Journal wants to continue blaming Obama for the stock market, then let's at least be consistent about this philosophy and apply it to other presidents.

Stock Market Does Well Under Democrats

For all the talk about Obama's negative impact on the stock market, let's not forget the Dow fell 5000 points (from 13,043 in Jan 2008 to 7949 in January 2009) in President Bush's last year in office. That's a 40 percent drop in 1 year under a Republican president.

And for those who blame last year's decline on the election of Obama, not true. Most of the drop in the Dow took place well before Obama was elected. The Dow plunged 38 percent last year (from 13,043 in January 2008 to 8175 in October 2008) before election day.

In fact, the Republicans don't want you to know this, but the Dow usually does quite well under Democrats. The only Democratic president in modern history to preside over a declining Dow was Jimmy Carter, and even then the Dow only fell 8 points (yes, you read that correctly, 8 points!) in 4 years, less than 1 percent of its value.

The Dow rose under Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton, but fell under Republican presidents Nixon and George W. Bush.

The worst performance in the Dow's history was October 19, 1987, when the index dropped more than 22 percent in one day. And it happened under Ronald Reagan's watch. To find any comparable loss, you have to go back to another Republican president - Herbert Hoover in 1929. In fact, 4 of the Dow's 5 worst years (1931, 1907, 2008, 1930 and 1920) happened under Republican presidents and all 5 of the Dow's worst days occurred under Republican presidents.

In contrast, the Dow's best day ever was March 15, 1933, just weeks after Franklin Roosevelt was sworn into office. That year, Roosevelt also presided over the Dow's best annual performance in history.

This doesn't mean the Democrats are always better for the stock market, or that the Republicans are always worse. Nor should the stock market be used as the sole indicator of a president's performance. That seems obvious, but try telling that to the editors of the Journal.

Obama's Budget Vote: Poised To Pass House, Senate

2009-04-02T08:12:38Z

WASHINGTON — Acting in quick succession, the House and Senate approved budgets Thursday night drawn to President Barack Obama's specifications and pointing the way toward major legislation later this year on health care, energy and education.

"It's going to take a lot of work to clean up the mess we inherited, and passing this budget is a critical step in the right direction," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. "Staying true to these priorities will help turn around the economy for the many Americans who are underwater right now."

Bob Cesca: Insane Republicans Reveal An Insane Budget Plan

2009-04-01T18:41:02Z

It only makes sense that a party currently being wagged by fringe crazy people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann would release its alternative budget on April Fools' Day.

Not only does the Republican plan freeze discretionary spending for five years in the midst of a recession which, by most accounts and proved by history, will countermand any sort of economic recovery, but it also cuts taxes by 10 percent for the same Wall Street executives whose actions largely got us into this economic mess in the first place. In other words: Congratulations, Republicans, you just released a budget that rewards wealthy corporate executives while blocking any attempt to dig us out of the economic catastrophe they created.

Smart!

The only bit of Republican legislation that'd be more ridiculous would be if Michele Bachmann were to introduce a constitutional amendment thwarting a fake plot to eliminate the dollar as the form of currency in the United States.

Oh wait. She's already done that. And 30 Republican congressmembers so far have co-sponsored the amendment. 30 Republicans have irrevocably tethered their wagons to the Bachmann crazy train. Excellent. Next on the agenda: a bill creating the Office of Robot Insurance, protecting us from robot attackers who use old people's medicine for fuel. Speaking of which, the Republican plan also phases out Medicare.

The marquee item, however, in the Republican plan is their inexplicably regressive tax cut for the super rich. Wealthy Americans in the top three tax brackets would see their tax burden cut to a flat 25 percent from previous rates of 35, 33 and 28. According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, CEOs from any of the top 800 corporations would receive a tax break of around $1.5 million a year. Meanwhile, if you earn $15,000 a year, your tax break will be around $0 a year.

But get this. Under the Republican plan, Americans are given the option of paying the old tax rates instead of the new, expensive and regressive Republican rates. So, for example, if your household income is $100,000, you could pay the same tax rate as someone earning $15,000. Or you could be a swell egg and go back to your old rate. Aside from the utter lack of fairness in the notion of a $100,000 household paying the same rate as a $15,000 household, who in their right mind would voluntarily pay higher taxes?

Now you might be asking, given that the Republicans are all about fiscal responsibility, how much does this Republican tax cut for the wealthiest three brackets actually cost? Some estimates, according to Steve Benen, project upwards of a $4 trillion price tag. At the very least, according to their own projections, the Republican plan would run up a $500 billion annual budget deficit through at least 2080. Again, the Republican grasp of fiscal responsibility is about as firm as their grasp of reality and sanity. The subtext here being: The trillion dollar Bush tax cuts weren't irresponsible enough. Let's go crazy! WOOO!

And by the way, those are annual deficits that factor into the mix a completely insane five year freeze on discretionary spending -- a freeze that would surely plunge the American economy into a deep depression. To that point, the Republican plan doesn't account for such an economic catastrophe, and therefore doesn't factor such an inevitable consequence into their revenue and deficit projects.

All told, imagine if you will the Monopoly man running up and shoving you into a deep precipice. The Republican plan not only gives that Monopoly man a $1.5 million check for his trouble, but it also cuts the rope you were using to climb out of the hole -- provided you actually survived the fall in the first place.

Speaking of holes, did you see the graph Paul Ryan clearly yanked out of his?

Check out that steep blue line illustrating the alleged Democratic budget deficits extending to upwards of 50 percent of GDP by 2060. Put another way, suggesting a deficit that's 50 percent of GDP is like presupposing a living human being that's 50 percent marshmallow man. It's insane. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections only extend out to 2019. Yet the Republican chart somehow extends out to 2080. The steep upwards slope of the Democratic budget begins at around 2030 -- 11 years after the furthest CBO projections stop.

What does this mean? For starters the claim on the chart: "Out-years based on CBO's Long-Term Alternative Fiscal Scenario" is a lie. And the text: "Source: House Budget Committee Republican Staff" might as well say: "Source: Paul Ryan's Ass." In other words, that steep upwards slope is entirely made up.

The graph might as well look like this:

Yes, the Democratic budgets will be so out of control they'll eventually make little curly-cues and travel backwards in time -- adding to past deficits -- while also looping around the word "government" -- you know, because the Democrats love government.

At this point, the laughable street vendor pamphlet that John Boehner rolled out was probably less ridiculous than this actual budget plan and its accompanying Wall Street Journal graph. But it stands to reason that given their track record the Republicans would churn out a budget proposal that's fully in line with their backwards, zero cred reputation.

BobCesca.com

CORRECTION: I erroneously credited the CEO taxation numbers to the Center for American Progress. These numbers came from the Wonk Room at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sen. Gregg Makes Up "Light Switch Tax" To Bash Obama Budget

2009-04-01T11:38:11Z

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A 'LIGHT-SWITCH TAX'.... In an apparent effort to be an even more shameless hack, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) argues in a Washington Post op-ed today that "all American families will get stuck with a new 'light-switch tax' on electricity bills that is in the president's budget."