March 14, 2010

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fiscal wake-up tour

Deficit Hawks Swoop Down on Washington

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress got a lot of good advice recently when representatives of The Concord Coalition’s fiscal advisory councils visited Capitol Hill to present their recommendations.

The basic message: Elected officials must make some dramatic changes to put the country on a more responsible fiscal course, protect our economic future and avoid saddling our children and grandchildren with massive debt.

Recent Fiscal Future Commission Developments

For the last few weeks, members of Congress have been increasingly pushing for a bipartisan commission to tackle the nation's fiscal challenges. The impetus has been the need to raise the debt limit as the national debt rapidly approaches the $12 trillion statutory ceiling.

"Waking-Up" a Mile High

The Concord Coalition’s Fiscal Wake-Up Tour made its second stop in Denver on Thursday, drawing around 700 people of all ages for a day-long collection of events. 

An alarm clock for Maine

Perhaps even more than most of Concord’s Fiscal Wake-Up Tour programs, the one in Maine this week underscored the need for a really big alarm clock.

The recession has sliced into the government's revenue while putting its spending on steroids. Concord Executive Director Robert L. Bixby offered the Wake-Up Tour audience of more than 200 in Kennebunkport a troubling factoid: last month’s federal deficit of $180 billion was larger than the deficit for all of 2007.

Not just "doom and gloom"

Speakers in the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour sometimes worry that all the bad news they are delivering may be leave audiences too discouraged about the country’s future. Too much gloom and doom, after all, could cause some people to simply throw up their hands in despair.

But while people who attended this week’s Wake-Up program in Kennebunkport, Maine, found the presentations sobering, they also seemed engaged and in many cases energized to seek solutions.

That was reflected both in the wide-ranging questions during the program and in comments from some audience members afterwards.

Iowa's Good Health (Care)

Yesterday, experts from the Iowa Committee for Value in Healthcare -- a diverse group of Iowa health care providers, purchasers, payers, patient advocates, and policy analysts -- sent a letter t

Krugman agrees with the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour (not that he wants to)

In Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's column Monday, he makes an interesting point about California's budget woes that supports much of what The Concord Coalition's message has been for the last three years traveling the country on the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. The irony is that he often protests much of what we stand for.

A Welcome Summit

Today’s Washington Post contains a very welcome front-page headline, “Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform.” The article explains that President-elect Obama plans to convene a fiscal responsibility summit in February. According to the Post story: