Aug 27 2010
A national debate over the federal budget and debt is getting closer to the forefront,
The New York Times reports. The question of whether there is a liberal argument to support debt reduction "is a critical one for Democrats, because the party is drawing ever closer to an internecine, once-in-a-generation war over whether to seriously scale back the federal budget." One liberal, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., has one such argument. He "doesn't argue that government does too much, or that programs like Social Security and Medicare aren't vital. Rather, in two recent conversations about the nation's finances, Mr. Blumenauer argued that if Democrats really want to protect a vast array of federal programs from repeated Republican onslaughts, then they need to bring the costs of the programs in line with reality" (Bai, 8/25).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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