While the President's press conference Wednesday night got a lot of attention and focused substantially on health care, he also did an interview with Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt earlier in the day. The wide-ranging interview touched on health care reform, but also on a lot of the other subjects Concord Coalition members are interested in -- like deficits, debt, Social Security reform and a BRAC-like fiscal commission. It is worth a read.

The Concord Coalition is currently engaging in a Fiscal Stewardship Project that takes us to select cities across the country. This project is designed as a follow-up to our Fiscal Wake-Up Tour visits in those cities and as part of that we have created local Fiscal Advisory Councils (F.A.C.'s) -- groups of local citizens interested in doing more to promote and discuss fiscal responsibility. These councils meet regularly and are focused not only on talking about our fiscal future, but also in discussing possible solutions to our long-term budget challenge.

One of the event types we conduct in conjunction with these F.A.C. meetings is called a "Choice Dialogue." These are day-long public forums where randomly selected individuals, from the cities where the F.A.C.'s are located, come together to work through the information about our fiscal challenge and coalesce around common values and solutions. The goal is for the conclusions they reach to then be presented to the F.A.C. members, who then undergo a lengthy dialogue of their own, so that the ideas and solutions the F.A.C. coalesces around can truly be said to be informed by community thoughts...

Now that the Congressional Budget Resolution has passed, there has been a lot of talk about how the reconciliation instructions included in the resolution will make it easier for a health care reform effort to pass.  Particularly since the mechanics of reconciliation provide for a simple majority vote for approval -- instead of the 60 votes that might be needed to overcome a filibusterer in the Senate.

Ironically, considering political motivations, it might be easier to round up 60 votes for a fiscally irresponsible health care reform bill, than to attain the 51 votes for a fiscally responsible bill -- which would be needed to utilize the reconciliation fast track procedure. 

Let me explain. When the modern budget process was established, the idea behind including a lower procedural bar under reconciliation was to facilitate legislation that contained difficult choices resulting in deficit reduction. Only in recent years have legislators deviated from this intention, most notably by the usage of reconciliation to pass large, deficit-increasing tax cuts.

The guidelines put in place by the budget resolution for reconciliation -- in a sense -- navigate this budget procedure closer to its original purpose. Specifically, for Congress to consider any health care reform bill, it must contain...

As you recover from what was hopefully a fun-filled St. Patrick's Day, it might be helpful if I were able to convert our latest issue brief into a fun, bite-sized and easily digestible, bullet list of the most interesting things we found in President Obama's first budget submission to Congress.

First some background: in general, every presidential budget is significant because it establishes the priorities and issues which the administration perceives to be most important and how they plan to address and resolve them. The first budget of a new administration is even more important in that it sets expectations for the coming years and how these policies reconcile with the promises made during the campaign. The submission the Obama Administration made at the end of February was just an outline of the larger budget they will present later in the year, but with enough information that Congress can turn towards creating the Congressional budget resolution in the next month or two.

Unlike the iconic shamrock used on St. Patrick's Day, our issue brief contains more than "three leafs" of knowledge [and you should still read the issue brief!]:

• The...