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All of Washington seems to agree that tax loopholes should be closed. Yet, as a practical matter, closing some of the biggest loopholes is no easy thing because of their importance to individuals and the economy as a whole. Take a meat cleaver to the home mortgage interest deduction and you hurt a fragile housing sector. Whack the exclusion of employer health insurance and you upend our system of work-based coverage.

Once upon a time, a few decades ago, members of the U.S. Senate spent a fair amount of time together and got to know each other personally. They were more likely to stick around Washington on the weekends, and during breaks, and socialized together more often with their families. 

Once upon a time, too, the party lines in the Senate were pretty fuzzy. Republican Senators from the north were often more liberal than Democratic Senators from the south. Alliances and friendship across party lines were common.

What would you do if you were laid off from a job? While you looked for a new position, you’d likely cut expenses as much as possible and begin drawing on any savings you have to pay the bills you can’t avoid. As time went on, you might turn to family, friends, and community institutions for assistance. With luck, you’d qualify for federal unemployment insurance benefits, and the $300 a week on average that they provide would be a critical support. At the same time, you might wind up putting groceries or gas on your credit card -- and then having trouble paying that bill.

Last year, in the midst of the holiday season, I pointed out that 90 percent of households have at least one unused item lying around and 70 percent have unused electronic items. It makes more fiscal and environmental sense to just not buy something, rather than buy it and not use it. Beyond that, reducing our consumption could help put pressure on decision-makers to start adopting alternative metrics that can better track our progress as a society and not just economic growth.

Extending the partial payroll tax holiday was not part of President Obama's most recent fiscal cliff offer, delivered this week, and that needs to change.

President Obama's most recent fiscal cliff offer would cut Social Security benefits by changing how that program calculates cost-of-living increases. This is a bad idea, for reasons I'll get to. But the bigger problem is that Social Security doesn't have anything to do with current budget deficits and shouldn't be part of any fiscal deal. 

There is a brand new housing crisis looming on the horizon and none of the financial or foreclosure reforms being considered get anywhere close to solving it. 

The Center for Responsive Politics compiles data on the 50 top interest groups giving money to Congress. Near the top of the 2012 list are the usual suspects—finance, insurance, real estate, and Big Oil. Near the bottom are casinos and the building materials industry (along with "Women's Issues.")

Women remain a scarcity in the top rungs of Corporate America. Females held only 14.3 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies in 2012, a smidge more than in 2011, according to 2012 Catalyst Census, a report from nonprofit Catalyst, which promotes women in business. Women at these companies also only held fewer than 1 in 5 board of director positions, at 16.6 percent—reflecting only half a percentage point of growth over 2011. And more than one-quarter of Fortune 500 companies had no women executive officers.