39, 41, 42, 43, 44 Have Lunch at the White House

Ezra Klein crunches the numbers and comes up with a lower total than you think

(NEWSER) - Mitt Romney has taken to carrying around a debt clock, blaming President Obama for the ever-climbing number it shows. But the clock doesn't show how much Obama has actually added to that debt, so Ezra Klein set out to find out. "There are two answers," he writes in the Washington Post . The first, which is "simple and wrong" is $4.7 trillion. That's what you get when you subtract the debt when Obama took office (about $10.5 trillion) from the current debt (about $15.2 trillion). More»

Longevity expert debunks myth that White House duty shortens life

(NEWSER) - President Obama's graying hair has set off the typical chatter that serving as president is so stressful it's bound to take years off a person's life. Not so, says a longevity expert in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In fact, our presidents tend to live longer than the rest of us. S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois crunched the numbers involving 34 presidents who died of natural causes and found that 23 exceeded the life expectancy of men in their era, reports Reuters . More»

US increasing spending on HIV treatment by $50 million

(NEWSER) - President Obama marked World AIDS Day with a promise of more money and increased attention both in the US and abroad, reports AP :

• The US will increase spending on HIV treatment within its own borders by $50 million.
• He promised to help 6 million people in hard-hit countries get access to proper medicine by 2014, raising the original goal by 2 million.
• The US also aims to help get drugs to 1.5 million pregnant women who are HIV-positive, to distribute 1 billion condoms in the developing world over the next two years, and to pay for 4.7 million male circumcisions in Africa.

He faults strategy on debt ceiling

(NEWSER) - Bill Clinton thinks the country is "a mess" right now, and while he mostly blames conservatives' anti-government views, he also "gently dings" President Obama for some miscues in his new book, reports the AP . For one thing, Clinton says he was able to persuade the rich to pay higher taxes because "I didn't attack them for their success," he writes in Back to Work. It's out next week, but the AP got an advance copy. More»

Bush policies account for $7T: Washington Post

(NEWSER) - The United States started 2001 with a cozy nest egg of more than $2 trillion, and now the country owes about $10 trillion—but who's to blame? Put simply, Obama-era policies account for $1.7 trillion of the debt, and Bush policies for over $7 trillion, the Washington Post reports in an economic breakdown of the past 10 years. As the Post has it, America's biggest challenge entering the 21st century was figuring out how to spend its Clinton-era surplus—and Bush decided to throw most of it at tax cuts. More»