Author: Darren Gersh, Washington Bureau Chief

The calendar in Washington is about to give new meaning to the concept of holiday stress.

December, normally a time when Washington kicks back and recovers from the legislative grind, is about to become one of the busiest months in memory.

On Tuesday President Obama heads to West Point to unveil his Afghan war strategy. This will be costly -- Afghanistan is now edging out spending for Iraq -- and may send the the price tag up to levels not seen since the surge in Iraq.

Then there is a job summit at the White House on Thursday. Look for this to increase expectations for a mini-stimulus in 2010.

Then there is the climate change news. The world will gather in Copenhagen to discuss a new treaty on Climate Change. They won't finish the job, but they are expected to make progress. And President Obama will join them on the 9th.

Did I mention health care? The senate is moving forward with debate up until Christmas on the most sweeping overhaul of health care ever.

Depending on your point of view, Washington will either leave many gifts under the nation's political Christmas tree by the time it heads home or many lumps of policy coal.

Let's face it, cutting costs is as much fun as dieting. Maybe less.

Which may explain why health care reform is such a daunting topic. The Senate bill that is facing a key procedural vote on Saturday is filled with complex policies to "bend the cost curve" on health care. There is a commission on costs, a tax on high-cost insurance plans, and a variety of new payment options for medicare.

The complexity implies more certainty than reality to the health care cuts. Congress is changing incentives and putting in place new structures that have a chance to save money, but are not proven to do so. It is hard to tell the voters that we have to try to cut costs, but don't really know how to do so.

The other issue, of course, is that the Senate bill expands coverage to millions of Americans. Budget hawks worry about combining guaranteed access with uncertain savings. Progressives fire back that it is unfair to squeeze out costs without first bringing everyone into the system.

These are the real issues. I wonder how much they will be debated this weekend?

The Goldman Sachs apology has been evolving over time. Here is what Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein told me at the White House in March:

"There was no doubt there was bad behavior and over leverage on Wall Street, like there was over leverage in every aspect of the economy."

In June, here is what Blankfein said:

"We participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice.

This week:

We're a leader in our industry and we participated in things that are clearly wrong and we have reasons to um, regret and apologize for and we're subject to. And some of this is real and some of this is extrapolated, but all of it can't be good for a firm that has to...for a financial service firm that sells its reputation in part that we will take care of your needs and not draw attention to ourselves.

It seems somehow fitting to write this as the President is visiting China. After all, I am old enough to have had my mother tell me: "Eat your food. People in China are starving."

Well, it appears that here at home we have too many people who eat far too much and too many people without enough to eat.

According to the Agriculture Department, 17 million U.S. families had trouble finding enough food over the course of the year. By the way, one-third of the country is also obese.

That's 72 million people who have too much to eat and 49 million who may not have enough to eat.

Beyond the humanitarian issues, why does this matter?

Back when I was just starting out in journalism, I left a job with the Washington Post/Newsweek Company to come to Washington DC.

The H.R. person conducting my exit interview offered me something called "COBRA" coverage. It was some kind of way to keep the health insurance I had while I found new work. I didn't understand it. It was new. I didn't want to pay out of pocket and my new job would have health insurance, right?

The H.R. woman seemed a bit too eager to get me to sign on the line confirming I did not want coverage.

And, of course, when I got to DC I was in for a rude surprise. My new job did NOT offer health insurance. And I spent the next year trying to cobble some coverage together.

At the time, it did not seem a very big deal. After all, I was young and healthy. Now that I am older and feel less invincible my health care lapses seem like a risky bet.

Under the health care reform now making its way through Congress, "young invincibles" -- those 25 and younger -- would be required to buy coverage. If reform passes, future generations will not be able to keep the change and wing their coverage like I did.

Under the Senate Finance plan, these young people could buy a low-cost policy covering catastrophic care.

What's the upshot of all this? Bringing young people into the "risk pool" lowers costs for the older people like me who are already in the system. Eventually, younger people will become older people and they too should enjoy lower premiums.

"World Tries to Buck Up Dollar" reads the headline in the Wall Street Journal.

Korea, Russia are buying up dollars to keep the greenback from falling. Are these nations concerned about our economic welfare? Do they believe supporting the dollar will stabilize the global economy?

No.

Simply put, countries that have sustained themselves by exporting to the US want to keep up the game. When the dollar falls, it makes our exports cheaper. It makes our imports more expensive. In other words, we can afford to buy less from the rest of the world.

No question bank regulators failed to detect, prevent or ameliorate the financial crisis. No question we can do better. The real hard stuff is figuring out how.

It's tempting to think reorganizing and creating new offices to replace those who failed will solve the problem. Or at least help.

But will it? The history of government reorganizations is not promising here. NYU Professor Paul Light studies this kind of thing. He counted some 10 reorganizations of the Department of Defense which began almost immediately after it was formed.

We've already reformed and reorganized the Department of Homeland Security three times.

Now Senator Chris Dodd wants to create a single super-regulator. The new Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration would inherit the supervisory staff of the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

We are talking about a lot of people here.

The teen unemployment set a new record in October: 27.6%.

Faced with the scary job market, many young people are heading for college or graduate school. Most of the increase in college enrollment is at community colleges.

It makes sense. If teenagers and young workers can't find a job, they can ride out the storm and use the time to improve their skills.

The only problem is that many other young people have the same idea. With employers cutting back and more people going to college, we could face a glut of new grads in a few years.

In some sense, the added education only postpones the job market pain. And that pain is likely to last for a while. Younger workers are often the first fired and the last hired. The Economic Policy Institute's Heidi Shierholz thinks the soft job market could last for another five to seven years!

"[P]arsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens (for example, words), to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given (more or less) formal grammar."

Let us now learn to parse the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee statement.

To begin with, the Federal Open Market Committee -- FOMC for short -- sets interest rate policy. These 12 people have a lot to say about how much you pay for a mortgage.

The statement comes out at 2:15 after the FOMC meets. You can find a statement here.

The first paragraph of the statement usually describes the Fed's take on the economy. The major sectors of the economy -- employment, industrial production, etc. -- are usually discussed. Important economic trends are mentioned here.

The second paragraph is often the "inflation paragraph." The Fed opines on any "slack" in the economy. Slack is often a fancy way of saying lots of people are out of work. If there is lots of slack in the economy -- unemployment -- people can't find jobs or are worried about finding jobs meaning they are unwilling to buy much. That means businesses can't raise prices.

The final paragraph is traditionally the "balance of risks" paragraph. As the financial crisis took hold, the balance or risks became a balance of terror. This paragraph became devoted to listing all the ways the Fed is fighting the credit crisis. Look here now to find hints on how fast the Fed is "unwinding" the various credit supports it has put in place.

For the last couple of weeks, we've been having a huge national debate over what to pay people.

Ken Feinberg, the Treasury's Special Master, has weighed in on bailed -out banks. The Federal Reserve is getting into the act, asking banks to explain the relation between pay practices and risk.

Today it was the Supreme Court's turn to dip a toe into the national discussion.

The case at hand is Jones v Harris Associates. Jones and two other plaintiffs are individual investors. Harris Associates is the sponsor of the Oakmark Funds and the investment adviser, a common feature of the mutual fund industry. To manage the conflict of interest between the adviser and the fund it operates, the law requires compensation be set by an independent board of trustees representing the fund.

The shareholders in this case argue Harris' fees are excessive because they are twice as high as those charged to institutions for virtually identical advice. Harris -- and the mutual fund industry -- argue the advice and services are very different, justifying the higher fees.