The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has a column today on Social Security and fixing it. The column's more or less in response to this Paul Krugman column where he objects to addressing Social Security's projected shortfall now. If Marcus believes Social Security needs fixing, fine. But she should then devote far more columns to projected health care costs, which is an even bigger problem and demands greater effort to solve it, yet policymakers aren't really paying attention to it. This is what CBO basically recommends.

Here's an interesting paper on the "starve the beast" school of government reduction by tax cut (via Inclusion). The abstract:

That's 65% of GDP (and a good argument for PAYGO) A dubious milestone was passed on Tuesday, November 6, as the U.S. national debt crossed the $9 trillion mark. Don't look now (no one likes a clock watcher), but it's billions more already. At 65 percent of GDP, it could be paid off if every good and service produced in the U.S. from January 1 until September 30, 2008 were given free of charge to the nation's creditors. You can spare that nine months' worth of salary, can't you?

The Senate is debating the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill today (and probably tomorrow), and Sen. Wayne Allard has introduced a disturbing amendment that would automatically cut the budget of any program that was given an "ineffective" PART rating by the Office of Management and Budget. Under Allard's amendment, any program that is listed as "ineffective" under the PART would be automatically cut by 10 percent, with the amount cut used to pay down the national debt. To see which programs would be cut, see this list of "ineffective" programs on the ExpectMore.gov website: programs rated ineffective. The list includes Even Start, the Perkins loan program, vocational education grants, Upward Bound, the Workforce Investment Act programs for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers and Youth, the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant, and the Healthy Community Access program, among others. But there is a larger issue at play here than where you come down on these programs or the PART itself (and you should come down against it). Congress is granted the authority to appropriate public funds under the Constitution, not the executive branch. Enacting this amendment would transfer that authority to the executive branch, and more specifically to a number of unelected public employees whose sole job is to carry out the policy preferences of the president. Why would any Senator want to vote to give him or herself less power? What's more, imagine the degree or manipulation of future PART scores for programs covered under this bill if this administration (or any future one) knew a rating of "ineffective" would bring an automatic 10 percent cut. Something tells me we would start to see a whole lot more "ineffective" ratings for programs in the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services. A vote on the amendment is likely later today or tomorrow morning. Please take 5 minutes to call your Senators offices to tell them to vote no on the Allard amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education bill.