Editorial

Military support

As the United States supports military forces in three war zones, the families left behind will get more attention thanks to efforts launched Tuesday by the White House.

A scant handful of Americans have served in the military since the country stopped conscripting soldiers in 1973. 

While no one was watching, the demographics changed too. More than half of active-duty National Guard and reservists are married. An estimated 43 percent have two children.

Instead of drafting legions of young men, force requirements are filled through enlistments and heavily augmented with the call-up of reserve units. The mix has more women and older men, who leave families and jobs to serve.

Add in the role of the military as a de facto employment program in tough times, and the dynamic changes. For reservists the cycle repeats again and again.

First lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, wife of the vice president, will visit cities across the U.S. in the next two days to promote "Joining Forces," a program coordinated by the Center for a New American Security.

They will lead what is described as a coordinated, comprehensive appeal to community organizations - employers, educators, philanthropists and faith groups - to be mindful of the needs in their area.

Military families have been overlooked as they shared the strain of separation from loved ones in harm's way. Their numbers now defy any response but an extended hand.

- The Seattle Times

Swiped fees

Stephanie Sack, who owns two Bucktown boutiques, is tired of paying hundreds of dollars a month in "swipe fees" to big banks, especially because the fees - assessed each time one of her customers uses a debit card - keep going up.

Stories like Sack's led last year to an effort spearheaded by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to limit the fees banks can impose when someone uses a debit card. Rules capping the fees are scheduled to go into effect on July 21, but now there are efforts in both the U.S. House and Senate to delay their implementation.

Congress should reject those efforts and let the new rules go into effect.

Each time someone uses a Visa or MasterCard debit card, the bank that issued the card charges a fee of 40 cents to 45 cents or more, though the Federal Reserve found the actual processing cost is only 4 cents. Because consumers typically use debit cards for smaller transactions while putting the big stuff on their credit cards, debit card swipe fees can take a significant bite out of a retailer's profits.

Nationwide, businesses are paying $16 billion to $20 billion a year in debit card fees, a cost that partly gets passed on to all consumers, even those who use cash.

Banks call caps on swipe fees a form of unwise price controls and say the caps actually would harm consumers because banks would make up for the lost revenue by tightening credit and possibly ending customer reward programs and free checking accounts. They also argue that small banks could be forced out of the business.

But the law exempts smaller banks with assets of less than $10 billion. And why should poorer families who are more likely to pay cash subsidize reward programs for wealthier card users?

- Chicago Sun-Times

Budget progress

The recent Sturm und Drang in Washington over a possible government shutdown was just a warm-up act for the more significant budget disputes to come this year. Rather than haggling over a few billions of dollars in spending, the debate over the budget for the next fiscal year will involve trillions of dollars worth of deficits and debt. And shortly after Congress adopts a budget, it will have to decide whether to raise the limit on federal borrowing beyond the current cap of $14.3 trillion.

From that perspective, the recent brinksmanship over funding the government through Sept. 30 seems like much ado about nothing. Still, the agreement reached last week mattered because lawmakers from both parties made real commitments that should ease the path to compromise on the bigger disputes - assuming they recognize and honor those commitments.

On the Democratic side, merely agreeing to cut domestic discretionary spending instead of freezing it (as President Obama had proposed) concedes that Washington's focus has shifted. No longer are budget debates going to be about borrowing and spending more to stimulate the economy. Now the goal is simply to shrink the deficit.

That shift forces Democrats to examine the health care entitlements - Medicare and Medicaid - that are the real source of the long-term deficit problem. Republicans, for their part, agreed last week to continue operating government in the red at least through September.

Some lawmakers are expected to try to make the debt-ceiling bill more palatable by throwing in provisions to cut the deficit. But the right places to rein in government borrowing are the budget and spending measures Congress passes every year, and the tax cuts that Washington has been passing out like candy for the past decade. Lawmakers should focus their deficit-cutting efforts on those targets.

- Los Angeles Times