Medicaid cuts in Michigan... Paulette Howell's son receives treatment for cerebral palsy through Medicaid. Gov. Jennifer Granholm's proposed 6 percent cut across the board in state Medicaid funding has created a wave of fear among the disabled and family members like Howell that it'll be harder to get treatment. "It's a dangerous situation for people who are disabled," said Howell, 58, of Waterford Township. Medicaid pays for the treatments for her 35-year-old son, Joe.

Returning to our long-standing concern about the 5-7 percent, five-year projections of federal revenue growth, we hereby put down a marker, in light of BEA's GDP growth estimate of 1.3 percent for the first quarter of 2007, released today. We will return to the question of the plausibility of the 5-7 percent revenue growth figures offered by the president, Congress, and even the CBO in about three weeks' time, when the CBO issues its next Monthly Budget Review.

An interesting debate on deficits has sprung up...

• Jared Bernstein argues against a narrow focus on balanced budgets.
• Greg Anrig's response
• For more on this critical debate, see the materials from this recent EPI event, our summary of it in The Watcher, and Dana's reaction.

UPDATE: Brad Plumer has a good take on the EPI event, and Ezra Klein responds. OK, that's enough.

At the Agenda for Shared Prosperity's "Beyond Balanced Budget Mania" forum earlier this month, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz gave a much-discussed 30,000-mile aerial perspective on how to look at and evaluate deficits and what we are buying with them: