Yesterday, I happened upon a short post by Berkeley economist Brad DeLong in which he quoted from a recent Daily Caller article taking the temperature of DC insiders prior to the start of President Obama's debt commission. DeLong found Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) comments about eliminating $300 billion worth of waste in Medicaid through the commission discouraging, as "[t]otal Medicaid spending this year is currently pegged at $280 billion." Notwithstanding his obvious mistake, I thought Coburn's comments were encouraging.

An article published Wednesday by ProPublica examines a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the government's insurance coverage of overseas contractors. Known as the Defense Base Act (DBA), the program is also the only tool for the government to keep track of contractor deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. As ProPublica notes, the number of contractor deaths over the last six months is staggering, but, because DBA chronically undercounts fatalities, the true total is unknown.

A Congressional Quarterly article (subscription) published this afternoon puts to rest recent rumors that Congress won't enact a budget resolution this year, quoting Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) that he has a "green light" from leadership to put something together. In his remarks, though, Conrad claimed he would produce an "aggressive budget" with deficit projections well below what the White House's budget proposal forecasts.

Chalk up another set of economic data under the category of "information most informed people knew a long time ago, but that will really upset the Teabaggers," because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Monthly Budget Review (MBR) for March, and, oh boy, are there some ugly numbers in there to cherry pick. With that said, there are some bright spots too.