We talk a lot about our aging workforce. We also tend to discuss obesity quite a bit. But what we rarely touch on is the deadly and costly combination of the two.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she underestimated how long the politics of health reform would last and didnt anticipate how much confusion the slow rollout of the legislation would create.

Ideas like higher pension contributions for federal workers are the hardy perennials of Obama's budgets, reprised year after year, along with more widely known proposals like taxing oil companies and the rich. Many of the ideas have been seen as candidates for inclusion in broader deficit deals that have never...