Picture this, if you will: A hurricane levels your house and you have to move into an apartment while your home is repaired. You are also a reasonable, sane, and mathematically competent homeowner who can budget living expenses appropriately. When you created your budget that year that the hurricane destroyed your home, you (rightfully) did not include in your budget a line-item for mortgage payments and rent. Let’s also imagine that you’ve had problems getting your home repaired due to unexpected problems with your contractor, various building codes, material shortages, etc.

Sen. Voinovich is making waves in his call for "pay-for-performance" to replace the traditional civil service for federal employees. What exactly does performance mean? How would the administration actually assess performance? We have some clues with the shoddy work they've been doing on assessing the performance of programs with the Program Assessment Rating Tool. OMB Watch just testified today about some of those problems -- check it out.

In this excellent article in today's Washington Post, columnist Allan Sloan explains why having an estate tax in place (he uses the 2009 levels as an example) would actually be more beneficial to most wealthy people than repealing the estate tax. He explains this issue in terms of having a stepped-up basis vs. a carry-over basis in place (the article explains it all very clearly).

After reporting yesterday that the House and Senate had yet to reach a compromise on the supplemental spending bill, they did in fact reach one last night. The $94.5 billion bill to fund the military and hurricane relief also sets the budget spending cap for the Senate at $873 billion (the Senate, remember, had orignally passed a budget resolution allocating $16 billion more in funding, mostly for human needs programs). A number of Senators wanted to boost the cap to $880 billion, but were unable to do so because of resistance from the White House and the House leadership.