Another article about Bush dropping the non-itemizer.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the government may continue to subsidize an AmeriCorps program that places volunteer teachers in religious schools, a decision with potentially significant consequences for President Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiative. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was a setback for the American Jewish Congress, the New York-based nonprofit advocacy group that filed the lawsuit.

This morning Alan Greenspan testified at a Congressional hearing on the Economics of Retirement. In his testimony before the Senate Special Committee on the Aging, Greenspan restated his support for the creation of private Social Security accounts. He is a proponent of these accounts partly because he believes diverting payroll taxes away from a fund that can be spent by Congress would allow lawmakers to see the true size of the budget deficit, and would pressure them to reduce it. He stated, "We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock boxes' around the trust fund real." Senator Clinton (D-NY) responded to these comments with criticism for Mr. Greenspan, whose 2001 testimony to Congress urging tax cuts to avoid a surplus, she said, "helped blow the lid off the lock box." The Bush tax cuts that Greenspan originally supported are currently largely responsible for our record-level budget deficit, and the fact that Congress must now cut spending on domestic programs in order to deal with this deficit. To read more about the hearing, click here.

In a Washington Post op-ed piece, former White House Chief of Staff and current President of the Center for American Progress John Podesta makes an excellent argument for how President Bush succeeded in 2001 in pushing through his tax cut plans and how progressives need to have a better strategy when responding to the President's Tax Reform Panel than was seen in 2001. In a first step to providing that better strategy, Podesta summarizes the Center for American Progress' alternative tax reform plan. You can read more about the Center's plan here.