Two years ago, my wife and I vacationed in Pakistan's Swat Valley. We spent an afternoon sightseeing in the hills, visiting stupas in the dense pine forests and carvings of the Buddha etched into sheer granite cliffs, remnants of the Buddhist civilization that had thrived in the valley for centuries. Later, we played badminton back at our hotel.
Nevertheless, Iranian officials "think any policy will be run through Israel before it gets to them and they will be stuck with policies that are unworkable," said Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who recently met with ...
But Obama's plan "does reinforce the importance of paying for health care reform," said Maya Macguineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "And that's the fight that the administration is pinning its fiscal ...
For a long version of this argument, read Bob Berenson and Len Nichols' argument in Making Medicare Sustainable. Last night, I spoke with Nichols, however, and he put it more pithily: "The thing I'd say about the whole genre of proposals in this area ...
"Health-care reform is entitlement reform" has become a mantra of the Obama administration. The idea is that Congress can add a massive health-care program this year -- covering the uninsured -- and use the same measures that pay for the health reform to fix the broader budget problems. If that sounds too good to be true, there's a reason.
"The simplest hypothesis is that they're trying to build a weaponizable device and they're still not that good at it," said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit group ...
Baucus may appear an unlikely standard-bearer, but "once he's committed, he's tenacious," said Len Nichols, head of health policy at the New America Foundation. For more than a year, Baucus has schooled himself -- and many on the committee -- on the ...
Reihan Salam, co-author of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" was online Wednesday, May 20 at 2 pm ET to take your questions about the party's efforts to find a winning identity. ...
On two separate issues -- health-care and the budget -- the president
has promised savings of $2 trillion. A total of $4 trillion dollars --
now that's real money. Unfortunately, the claims are completely
exaggerated.
Closing future deficits with either tax increases or spending cuts would require gigantic changes. Discounting the recession's effect on the deficit, Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the underlying "structural deficit" -- the basic gap between the government's spending commitments and its tax base -- at 3 to 4 percent of GDP. In today's dollars, that's roughly $400 billion to $600 billion.
