Lindsay Koshgarian is research director at the National Priorities Project, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to making the federal budget accessible and transparent, so people can influence federal spending on their priorities. She is mom to two girls and lives in Northampton, MA.
Blog Post List
December 12, 2018
On Thursday Congress passed a stopgap funding measure to keep parts of the federal government open until December 21, when Congress must pass another spending measure or again face a government shutdown. President Trump has said that he will veto any bill that doesn’t give him the $5 billion he has demanded for his border wall, even if it causes parts of the government to shut down and send federal employees into the holidays without their regular paychecks . Five billion dollars is not huge in a federal discretionary budget of more than $1 trillion. But it’s an incredibly meaningful sum to...
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May 27, 2016
This week, President Barack Obama will make a historic visit to Hiroshima: the first place on earth where human beings were subject to the devastation of a nuclear weapon, dropped by the United States. He will be the first sitting U.S. president to make the trip. It’s worth celebrating this bit of real progress: that a sitting U.S. president will for the first time stand in contemplation at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. This is the president who in 2009 stood before a crowd in Prague to declare his commitment to seek “a world without nuclear weapons.” It is also the president who in 2009, on...
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May 11, 2016
VHS tapes, 8-tracks, a computer bigger than your car. Some things are better left in the past. Huge Pentagon budgets should be one of them. Although we are supposed to be ramping down efforts in Afghanistan, Congress continues funding the U.S. military at historically high levels: In 2016 we will spend $19 billion on nuclear weapons alone, and less than half that -- just $8 billion -- on Head Start. Our priorities are clearly out of whack. We sink more than a half trillion dollars annually into a highly privatized global “defense” system, yet we have no paid parental leave, free or affordable...
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April 23, 2016
EarthDay.png I’m old enough to remember when Earth Day was mostly about planting trees and recycling. Since then, it’s taken on a whole new urgency as we’ve ( most of us , anyway) realized that this climate change thing is real, it’s our fault, and it’s serious. So it’s strange to realize that on this Earth Day in 2016, we’re collectively still shrugging our shoulders at this threat that most of us recognize. It’s even stranger to realize that we’re shrugging our shoulders when there’s so much we could do, if we just placed our priorities differently. Like this example: if we cut funding for...
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March 21, 2016
President Obama’s got a handful of great ideas in his budget proposal: free community college, universal preschool, and more. But he still proposes to spend more than half of our federal discretionary budget on the Pentagon and military – and only a small fraction of that actually goes to our troops. Think there must be a better way? Here are just five reasons to support the People’s Budget. Congress will vote on the People’s Budget and other alternatives after they come back from Easter break. A sk your member of Congress to support the People’s Budget! More votes for the People’s Budget...
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October 19, 2015
All at once, I changed jobs and our part-time babysitter moved on after three terrific years: the scramble was on for loving, enriching child care at a price that didn’t break our family’s budget. Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe it was 30 years ago, or maybe just last year. Maybe you’re not a parent at all. You don’t have to be – turns out preschool is good for everybody. Here are five reasons we need universal preschool right now: Preschool is good for kids. Whether or not we need childcare to allow us to work, many of us parents choose to send our kids to preschool. Why? Because we have a...
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October 19, 2015
The U.S. is expected to reach the debt ceiling in just 18 days, on November 3. And then the trouble starts.
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October 8, 2014
When you look at how our federal government spends money, do you see the priorities of your family and your community reflected? Your own day to day priorities might include getting something on the table for dinner, volunteering at your child’s cash-strapped school, scheduling doctors’ visits, or worrying about whether your family earns enough to pay your bills, let alone save for college or retirement – or all of the above, at the same time. Our Voter’s Guides will help you get informed about federal spending on things like healthcare, education and social security, so you can make sure...
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