Economy & Budget

More than 36 million heart-shaped boxes will be sold this Valentine’s Day, according to the National Confectioners Association. All told, confectioners will move more product than on any other day except Halloween, Easter and Christmas.
 
But behind each box is a fascinating tale about profit and political power plays.
 
First, the profit. Multinational candy companies like Mars Inc., which is expanding and just opened a new state-of-the-art plant in the Midwest, are increasing production, raising consumer prices and banking big margins. Considering the cost of their main ingredient, sugar, is plummeting, it’s a recipe for riches.

Last month’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit surprised the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by ruling that three Board members were unconstitutionally recess appointed by President Barack Obama.
 
While the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and its Director Richard Cordray were not the subject of the opinion, the Court’s decision could well give rise to similar CFPB challenges because Cordray was appointed under the same circumstances as the invalidated NLRB members.
 
What happens next remains unclear. The NLRB simply shrugged its shoulders and the Obama administration is seemingly sluggish to appeal.  Furthermore, the administration is content to pretend that the decision has no impact whatsoever on the CFPB.

A plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty famously reads “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus was so moved by the plight of immigrants in New York City that she penned these immortal words, which have come to represent America’s promise as a beacon of hope ever since. 130 years since she penned those words, our nation still finds itself wrestling with the question of how best to treat those who would join our ranks as Americans. I say we should all embrace Comprehensive Immigration Reform because immigration has helped make our nation the complex, wonderful and prosperous land it is today.

When Woodrow Wilson established the annual State of the Union address a hundred years ago, the United States had a strict policy forbidding Asian immigrants from even setting foot on our shores. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the law of the land, and it remains the only federal law to ever exclude an entire group of people from immigration solely because of their race.

Tonight, President Obama will step to the same podium and chart a new course for our nation – one that will hopefully result in a common sense immigration process. Moving forward, it is crucial that we also recognize the impact of our broken immigration system on Asian Pacific Americans, a community that is often overlooked in this debate.

Time and time again through history, when disaster strikes, the president asks, “Where are my carriers?” I have long fought to ensure a ready answer - resources to build more aircraft carriers and prevent early carrier retirements, resources to protect our national security. I never thought the day would arrive when our nation could not answer that call because it could not afford the cost of sailing a carrier from the East Coast to the Persian Gulf.
 
That date came on February 6, when the Department of Defense announced that the “budgetary constraints” of sequestration would prevent the Navy from sending a second aircraft carrier, the USS Truman, to Middle East waters.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created by Congress in 1934, with America in the throes of the Great Depression. Since its inception, FHA has insured 34 million home mortgages, providing homeownership opportunities to tens of millions of low and moderate income borrowers who might not have otherwise been able to own a home.

The sky is falling, the seas are rising, the earth is moving, and catastrophe is on the horizon. Or so say alarmist Pentagon officials and defense contractors and their lobbyists in describing the potential impacts of automatic cuts known as ‘sequestration’ to anyone who will listen.
 
To be sure, sequestration is not an ideal way to plan a budget. Making adjustments mid-fiscal year makes little sense from a management point of view. The best solution is for the president and the Congress to come up with a balanced package of revenue increases and domestic and Pentagon spending reductions that phases in strategically over time.

As we survey the horizon and consider the issues that lawmakers today are faced with, the natural conclusion is that the 113th Congress will be another challenging period for our political leaders.

Eleventh-hour deal-cutting, once a rare occurrence, is now standard operating procedure for a broken legislative process. This new regular order of brinksmanship provides little in the way of certainty to job creators; instead, it guarantees that just a few months down the road, Congress will once again return to dramatic 11th bickering, posturing and legislative clashes.

During his second inaugural speech, the president proclaimed that "[o]ur journey is complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.” Powerful words, indeed. The problem is that, coming from him, they ring hollow.
 
The president loves to pontificate about immigration, but the reality is that since his administration began, he hasn’t done anything to advance the discussion of immigration and help forge the bipartisan consensus necessary to address this important issue. He’s only made promises that he hasn’t kept.

We can predict some of the State of the Union themes President Obama will strike as he lays out a full and ambitious first year agenda for his second term. Cutting federal spending, renewing the economy, reforming immigration laws, and curbing gun violence would seem to be sure things for inclusion.

Yet, from his 2010 address, Obama has one piece of unfinished business he should not ignore: the pledge to double U.S. exports. 
Obama should continue his commitment to boost the nation’s exports as a fuel for jobs and economic growth and partner with business, civic and government leaders in cities and metro areas to get the job done.