Source: USA TODAY

Here’s some good news coming out of Washington for a change: The federal government’s massive budget deficit is shrinking rapidly.

From a peak of $1.4 trillion in 2009, the deficit is forecast to drop to $845 billion this year and to $430 billion in 2015, says the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). During the three months that end June 30, a period when most Americans pay their taxes, the federal government is expected to run a quarterly surplus for the first time in six years.

This is significant progress, brought about by the recovering economy, and by a series of a spending cuts and tax hikes enacted in recent years. But what should we make of this trend?

Should we chill the champagne? Should we take our cues from liberals who say it’s time to stop worrying about debt and focus on job creation and investment? Should we conclude that, even as President Obama and Congress careen from crisis to crisis, they are solving America’s fiscal problems?

The answer is: none of the above.

For one thing, the deficit, though lower, remains too high. Yes, this year’s $845 billion is an improvement after four straight years of trillion dollar deficits. But the government is still borrowing nearly 25 cents of every dollar it spends, something it should do only during a crisis.

More important, Congress and the White House have yet to address the core problem fueling long-term deficits: the automatic and runaway spending on health care and retirement benefits.

The same CBO projection that shows the deficit bottoming out in 2015 has it bouncing back to nearly $1 trillion by the early 2020s. That’s because the deficit-reduction measures taken so far will be overwhelmed by the borrowing needed to fund explosive growth in programs such as Medicare and Social Security as Baby Boomers retire.

This should be a clarion call to liberals to get their heads out of the sand and address the programs’ inadequacies. It’s true that Boomers have put enough money into the Social Security system to finance their retirements, but the money is gone — spent on previous generations’ retirement and for other purposes. That might not be fair, but it’s true.

Medicare, meanwhile, is grossly underfunded. According to the Urban Institute, a typical couple who turned 65 in 2011 will have paid $119,000 in Medicare taxes and can expect to receive $357,000 in benefits — with both figures adjusted for inflation. That’s not sustainable.

The steps needed to finish the deficit job are spelled out in the latest version of Simpson-Bowles and similar budget plans: Smart, flexible cuts in domestic and military programs. Tax simplification that eliminates loopholes, lowers rates and raises revenue. And changes in the big benefit programs that account for three-fifths of federal spending, such as less generous cost-of-living increases and higher retirement ages for able-bodied workers, and particularly Medicare cost controls.

If Congress and the White House could stop fighting long enough to adopt a farsighted deal with those elements, that would be cause for breaking out the bubbly.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Three years ago, when the Supreme Court opened the door to unlimited political donations by corporations, Justice Anthony Kennedy made the case for transparency as the best way to keep politics clean.

Thanks to the power of the Internet, Kennedy wrote in the landmark Citizens United decision, “shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

Alas, the world he described does not exist. Citizens and shareholders can’t make these determinations because they lack the basic information to do so.

As the law stands, companies can’t donate directly to candidates. And certain types of political expenditures require disclosure, either by the donor or the recipient. But companies can secretly give unlimited amounts to independent political advocacy groups designed to get around the disclosure laws.

Some $315 million of this “dark money” flowed into the 2012 elections, according to Common Cause. And there is no way of knowing how much might have come from publicly traded corporations.

Now a group of shareholder advocates, government reformers and money managers is petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission for a rule requiring disclosure of political spending. Among the benefits of such a rule:

Corporations would be less likely to fall into the trap that retail giant Target did in 2010, when it gave $150,000 to a political action committee aligned with anti-gay candidates and causes. Target apparently did not realize that the PAC had to reveal its donors. When the news came out, Target was faced with a public relations fiasco.

Opponents of the rule argue that it would have to be impossibly complex, drawing lines between contributions to overtly political groups, which would require disclosure, and trade associations and charitable groups, which would not.

In fact, the SEC is in the business of writing complex rules, and it could borrow definitions of political spending already written by the Federal Election Commission.

If the Supreme Court is intent on allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of shareholders’ money on political causes, the least shareholders can expect is the information they need to raise a stink.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Rapid technological change has a way of leaving oddities in its wake. Look no further than the VHS tapes stacked in your closet, or the lonely pay phone at the corner gas station. Or the fact that you pay sales tax on purchases at local stores but not on those at many online retail sites.

The exception for certain Internet purchases might seem like a good deal for consumers. But taxing brick-and-mortar stores, while exempting many of their e-commerce competitors, has a number of negative effects. Among other things, it:

What’s more, the impact is growing worse by the month. Online retail, barely a radar blip in 2000, is now a quarter trillion dollar industry, one projected to double in roughly six years.

All this makes us pleased to report that states are getting closer to winning permission from Congress to tax all sales the same, whether they come from a corner grocer, a nearby Wal-Mart, or an online site such as eBay.

The congressional nod is necessary because, back in 1992, in a mail-order case that preceded e-commerce, the Supreme Court ruled that states don’t have the legal authority to tax sales from vendors that don’t have a “physical presence” within their borders.

The Senate began debate this week on a measure, endorsed by the Obama administration, that would grant such authority. States that opt to collect these taxes would have to meet a threshold of having a relatively simple tax code. And businesses with annual sales of less than $1 million would be exempt.

The only real question about the bipartisan plan is why it took so long. For years, online merchants threw up objections.

First they said they needed special protection to help incubate their fledgling industry. That argument became less and less viable as e-commerce became more and more profitable. Then the Internet retailers insisted that they couldn’t possibly be asked to keep up with 50 sales tax codes, with thousands of variations in localities. Never mind that computer programs can do that easily, or that national brick-and-mortar chains have done it for years.

Finally, the tide seems to be turning in favor of the states and conventional retailers pushing for equal tax treatment. Even Amazon, which collects sales taxes in states where it has distribution centers, is now for it because the company is moving toward same-day delivery.

A law treating all sales equally for tax purposes is long overdue. Now it’s time for members of Congress to show that even if they can’t keep up with technological change, they can at least catch up to it.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

In the days after the Boston Marathon bombings, everyone wanted to know two things: Who did it, and why?

The answer to the “who” question might have come swiftly after Thursday’s release of security camera photos. In an extraordinary tribute to the power of technology, the suspects were identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, two brothers whose family had come to Boston a decade ago from Chechnya.

The answer to the “why” question is likely to take considerably longer. That makes it important not to jump to conclusions about motivations, to score political points or to engage in guilt by association.

Information that emerged in the chaotic hours after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a police shootout early Friday didn’t fit into any neat profile, aside from the fact that the suspects were young adult males.

Were the brothers extreme Islamic terrorists who had become radicalized and acted out of religious anger or sympathy with Chechen separatists, including radical Muslims, who’ve been waging war with Russia? Were they rage-filled killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 13 at Columbine High School? Did they have the sort of distorted Svengali-pupil relationship shared by the older John Allen Muhammad and the younger Lee Boyd Malvo, the Washington, D.C., snipers in 2002? Or did they have some twisted combination of motives?

The sheer variety of psychopaths and their deranged motivations should make anyone wary of drawing conclusions about what drove the bombers to their mad acts until more is known. It’s too early to say whether they kept the plot to themselves, but if they did, theirs is the kind of attack by “lone wolves” that authorities have long feared. Only luck saved the nation from one such attack, in Times Square, when a Pakistan-born man’s car bomb failed to detonate before it was discovered.

Identifying and stopping these kinds of attacks, without harassing innocent people or turning the nation into a police state, is extraordinarily difficult. What’s easy is knowing what not to do while the tragedy in Boston is still unfolding.

One thing to avoid is trying to score points, on immigration or gun control or other partisan issues, based on flimsy evidence. But some people just can’t help themselves. Lawmakers, including Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, seized on the fact that the brothers immigrated to the United States to try to attack the idea of overhauling the nation’s immigration laws. Never mind that the suspects were in America legally, or that the vast majority of immigrants come to find work and better their lives.

The other thing not to do is to engage in collective blame. No one should take the brothers’ Islamic religion or ethnicity as permission to denigrate all Muslims or Chechens, a lesson the nation surely should have learned in the years since 9/11.

In emotional remarks on Friday, Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the Boston brothers living in a Maryland suburb outside Washington, told reporters that his nephews “put a shame on the entire Chechnyan ethnicity.” No, Ruslan, they did not. The mindless savagery they’re accused of shamed them, not an entire people.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

The ongoing trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell is finally getting the attention it deserves, and for good reason.

The 2011 grand jury report on Gosnell, charged with murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies, is a gruesome and disturbing document. It includes accounts of fully delivered, live babies having their spinal chords severed by scissors. And it describes horribly unsafe and unsanitary conditions at a business that allegedly operated as a pill mill by day and rogue abortion clinic by night.

The report also details a complete breakdown of oversight by multiple agencies, hospitals and professional organizations that allowed the clinic to operate in plain sight for decades. These included the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and State, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, the National Abortion Federation and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, all of which were either tasked with regulating the clinic or had obtained information about what was going on inside.

It took a nighttime raid by agents from the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, who had gotten wind of the clinic’s pill business, to uncover the house of horrors that the regulators overlooked.

For whatever reason — lack of awareness of the case, faulty judgment — national news organizations were largely ignoring Gosnell’s trial, which began March 18, until anti-abortion activists and USA TODAY columnist Kirsten Powers called them out. The combination of alleged mass murder and regulatory failure warrants national coverage. What it doesn’t warrant, however, is major changes in national abortion policy.

As the grand jurors predicted in their report, both sides in the abortion wars are using the Gosnell trial to score points.

Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., one of the most steadfast and vociferous abortion opponents in Congress, has already cited the trial to press his case against “the brutality of abortion and the violence that is commonplace inside the abortion industry.” Other abortion foes have used the case to push for more stringent laws, such as the one recently enacted in Virginia that requires clinics to adopt hospital-style building codes, or ones enacted in Mississippi and Alabama requiring abortion doctors to obtain admitting privileges at a local hospital.

On the other side of the debate, abortion rights activists have argued that the Gosnell case was not the product of overly permissive regulations but of overly restrictive ones. They say clients ended up at his ghastly clinic because other options were not available or were too costly.

All these arguments have weaknesses. Many of the new laws are obviously designed to make abortions unavailable by driving up providers’ costs. And it doesn’t take much more than an Internet search to turn up other Pennsylvania clinics that will provide abortions as late as the 24th week of pregnancy, the legal limit Gosnell is accused of violating.

Aside from the obvious — that regulators should do their jobs, and that criminal doctors should be harshly prosecuted — it’s hard to say what else should be concluded from the Gosnell case.

Unless evidence emerges that clinics like his exist in other parts of the country, the case looks like an appalling anomaly.

Just as the murder of an abortion doctor by a fanatic isn’t representative of the broad anti-abortion movement, nor are the alleged atrocities at Gosnell’s clinic representative of abortion providers more generally.

If Gosnell is convicted, perhaps his story is best seen the way the grand jurors — who held diverse views on the morality of abortion — saw it: as a case of “disregard of the law and disdain for the lives and health of mothers and infants.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

The video is blurry, but you can make out the man in a trench coat firing 20 to 30 rounds at the White House as screaming tourists run — until he tries to reload his SKS semiautomatic rifle and bystanders tackle him, knocking him to the sidewalk and ending the incident.

This isn’t reality TV or a scene from a movie. It happened on a sunny Saturday afternoon in October 1994, when a deranged young man from Colorado opened fire. As in many other such shootings, potential victims escaped death when the shooter paused to reload.

It happened again in Tucson in January 2011, when Jared Loughner killed six people and wounded 13 with his Glock 19 handgun. Only when Loughner tried to swap in a second 33-round magazine did bystanders tackle him and take away his gun.

And it might have happened again last December in Newtown, Conn., when Adam Lanza stopped his shooting rampage briefly to swap 30-round magazines in his AR-15 assault rifle. Families of the children and educators killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School told CBS’ 60 Minutes that gave 11 children time to race to safety, sparing them the fate of the 20 first-graders and six educators Lanza managed to murder. “There’s 11 kids out there today that are still running around on the playground,” said Bill Sherlach, whose wife was killed when she tried to stop Lanza.

Much of the focus since the shootings at Newtown has been on the semiautomatic weapons that let shooters fire bullets as fast as they can pull the trigger: It took Loughner barely 16 seconds to fire 33 bullets, for example.

But as the Senate votes on gun safety proposals today, just as important as banning a class of weapons is limiting the high-capacity magazines that help make them so deadly.

Like the other proposals the Senate will consider — universal background checks, new penalties for gun trafficking and school safety measures — limiting magazine size to no more than 10 bullets is no panacea. But like the other proposals, it would help save lives, and the arguments against it are largely unconvincing.

Critics say limits are pointless because experienced shooters can swap magazines in two seconds or less. But examples like the ones above show that an agitated gunman in the heat of a rampage could take longer, and even a brief pause is long enough for someone to stop the shooter or for people to escape.

There’s no compelling need for oversize magazines at the range, and hunters — who usually limit themselves to three to five rounds — deride them as unsportsmanlike and unnecessary.

Defenders of large magazines say they can be crucial for self-defense, but the number of Americans who find themselves in movie-like shootouts with bad guys is minuscule. The question is balance, and here the balance should tip in favor of making it harder for criminals and deranged shooters to get magazines that enable them to fire 30 rounds or more before they stop.

Critics point out that there are millions of high-capacity magazines in private hands already, so banning new ones will do little good. That was also true when Congress banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in 1994, but when the ban expired in 2004, both the weapons and the magazines had become scarcer and more expensive.

That’s the goal now. It’s a modest but important step, and the Senate has a chance to take it, and save lives.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Americans are naturally suspicious of any immigration plan that promises to stop undocumented workers in the future while granting normal status to those already here.

There’s good reason for that suspicion. The last major overhaul of immigration law, in 1986, granted amnesty with little enforcement. Within 20 years, the number of people in the United States illegally had swelled from 3 million to 11 million.

That failure helped torpedo a fresh effort, six years ago, to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. And it explains why enforcement is the linchpin to the latest effort, announced Tuesday by a bipartisan group of eight senators.

Like the failed effort of 2007, the new measure would enhance efforts to stem illegal immigration while creating an arduous route to citizenship for the estimated 11 million. The “Gang of Eight” plan also changes rules for legal immigration and creates a guest-worker plan for labor-intensive industries that have relied on undocumented workers.

All these elements are important, but enforcement is the key. Politically, it is needed to get a law passed. Practically, it is needed to ensure that today’s 11 million aren’t followed by another 11 million.

Evidence from the past few years suggests that better enforcement is already having an impact. Demographers have been struck by the rapid decline in illegal immigration as Washington has beefed up its presence on the Mexican border and increased deportations. Also playing a part: the soft economy in the United States and the declining birth rates in Latin America.

The proposal released Tuesday includes a number of enforcement targets to be met before undocumented workers could apply for permanent residency:

This kind of multipronged assault on illegal immigration is necessary to prevent the tide from picking up again once the economy improves.

The Gang of Eight plan will undoubtedly undergo changes as it wends through the legislative process. But it’s a good starting point for addressing one of the nation’s most vexing problems.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

By now the ritual is sadly familiar: We gather around TV sets, watching in disbelief as choppy video clips play over and over. We try to make sense of the latest example of inexplicable violence in an unexpected place.

Six years ago Tuesday, it was the campus of Virginia Tech. Last July, a movie theater in Colorado. In December, an elementary school in Connecticut. And on Monday, the finish line of the iconic Boston Marathon, where a pair of explosions killed at least three people and wounded scores more.

Like the other attacks, the Patriots’ Day bombing came as a surprise, but perhaps it should not have. The Heritage Foundation has counted more than 50 terrorist plots — 42 of them homegrown — since 9/11, and the success in foiling them has fostered a sense of complacency.

The reality, so vividly illustrated Monday by the futility of trying to protect the 26 mile route of the marathon, is that it’s impossible to safeguard every place people gather or to anticipate every madman. As former Boston police commissioner Bill Bratton told NBC News, “You can’t protect everything all the time.”

Even places full of weapons are vulnerable, as the radicalized Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan proved when he shot and killed 13 military personnel at Fort Hood in 2009. Only luck saved New York’s Times Square from what would almost surely have been a devastating car bomb attack by a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen in 2010.

Who would do something so awful as to attack the Boston Marathon, and why? From bitter experience, the nation has learned not to leap to conclusions.

In 1995, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was first widely believed to be the work of foreign terrorists, not the homegrown madmen who filled a rental truck with fertilizer bombs and killed 168 people. The bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 that killed one person and wounded 111 others was initially blamed on an innocent security guard; a white supremacist turned out to be responsible.

Given the ubiquity of security camera footage and clues from the crime scene, the nation will likely know the truth about Boston soon enough without smearing the guiltless.

Much like the way bombing victims react immediately after an explosion — Do I have all my arms and legs? My eyes? My fingers? Are the people near me OK? — we count the casualties to decide how shocked to be, how badly we’ve been wounded. It is no consolation to the victims, of course, but by that measure the Boston bombings could have been far worse, had the explosions been more powerful or the crowds even denser at the time.

So how should we react to the tragedy in Boston? With resolve. Without finger-pointing or trading away our essential freedoms. And without overreaction, because that is what terrorism is intended to provoke. Yes, we’ll have to keep security tight at sporting and other big-crowd events for the foreseeable future. And we should gripe less about the need for it all.

Most important, we need to bring to swift justice the coward or cowards behind this despicable act.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.