As the competitive landscape for benefits brokers gets tougher, effectively communicating benefits strategies with clientsand helping them better communicate those strategies with their employees becomes even more critical.

The Senate will vote at noon on Tuesday on a historic measure pairing an increase in the government's borrowing limit with promises of more than $2 trillion of budget cuts over the next decade.

The first phase of a deal to raise the government's borrowing limit would pose little threat to the economy in the short term because almost none of the spending cuts would occur before 2014.