By Neal Peirce For Release Sunday, January 24, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
“This may be the most calamitous fiscal year states have known in decades,” reports Rob Gurwitt in Governing magazine, the 23-year old bible on coverage of state and local governance across the continent.
And the coming fiscal year, experts are predicting, may be almost as grim as the states run out of budget gimmicks, rainy day funds and the infusion of federal stimulus money that helped them, finally, to balance their current budgets. The states’ cumulative 2010 and 2011 budget shortfalls may be about $350 billion–a third of a trillion dollars–estimates the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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By Robert Lang For Release Sunday, January 25, 2010
Citiwire.net
It may be in bad timing when the Republican Party is now in the assent and so protective of Ronald Reagan’s legacy to argue that Washington National Airport should remove the former president’s name, but that is exactly what I suggest. The reason is not to slam Reagan, who even president Obama acknowledges “changed the trajectory of America.” Rather a name change is needed to recognize the president who created National Airport–Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I can already hear the shouts from the GOP that such a switch would be nothing more than a naked display of power akin to the constant renaming of places that follows regime change in other, less stable parts of the world. Yet the case for “Roosevelt National Airport,” on merit is compelling. Roosevelt’s efforts were instrumental in every phase of the project–from funding, to site selection, to construction, to design.
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