By the looks of the September personal income data released this morning, we went back to the consumer slump in September. Cash for clunkers has officially clunked.

The decline in personal consumption expenditures was led by the decline in consumption of durables goods in the wake of Cash for Clunkers. At an annual rate, consumption of durable goods dropped by 47.2 billion, or 7% (see above). The overall decline in personal income expenditures showed a .5% decline...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry is going to give a major speech on Cuba on Friday, the 6th of November, at Boston University.

Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) -- who has been doing much of the heavy lifting on the Freedom to Travel (to Cuba) bill is also going to be at this important conference.

What has been interesting to watch in Senator Kerry's speeches this past year is a tendency to define challenges more clearly than the White House -- to articulate the costs of inaction or poor focus -- and to assimilate different policy alternatives with a candid discussion of opportunities and costs...

Increasing numbers of national security leaders of the likes of Brent Scowcroft and George Shultz have said that the US embargo of Cuba makes no sense and harms American interests.

Republican Congressman Jeff Flake -- the hunky Arizona Congressman who recently spent five days alone on a remote Pacific island -- has reminded Americans that it is COMMUNIST governments that are supposed to get a kick out of restricting the movements of its people -- not DEMOCRATIC governments. Congressman Bill Delahunt has been leading in the House along with Byron Dorgan in the US Senate in calling for an end to all travel restrictions on Americans...

Tomorrow, the New America Foundation is giving back up support for a large conference in the US Senate organized by the RAND Corporation focused on American policy options toward Afghanistan. I think the event is sold out at this point -- with more than 500 attendees -- but the videos will be posted at a later time here at The Washington Note.

But what do Afghans think about their situation?...

Yesterday, I attended a Georgetown Law-Aspen Institute session with "pay czar" Kenneth Feinberg (a title he says his Russian grandmother would have abhorred: he prefers Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation). The timing was propitious: just last week, Feinberg announced 2009 payment structures and restrictions for the top 25 executives at the seven firms that have received the most TARP cash (the murderers' row: Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial). In yesterday's conversation with the FT's Clive Crook, Feinberg outlined the methodology he used to reach his conclusions, defended himself against criticisms of overreach, and described the next steps and larger implications of his decisions....

Yesterday, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer spoke at the Center for American Progress on Health Care Reform and the Budget Deficit.

Romer aimed to make the case the health reform was the key to deficit reduction, explaining...

The Case-Shiller index reported higher than expected values in house prices in August for the largest 20 cities across the U.S. The gains came on the back of government tax credits and programs to increase lending.

But, prices may have further to fall. As you can see in the chart above from Haver Analytics and David Rosenberg, housing prices adjusted for inflation would have to fall by another 20% to reach their mean historical value...

The health care reform bill recently passed by the Senate Finance Committee relies on a $200 billion health insurance tax to help fund the costs of expanding health insurance coverage. Although there are some exceptions, the policy generally imposes a 40% excise tax on each dollar of health insurance premium beyond $8,000 for an individual or $21,000 for a family...

In contrast to a number of progressives I know, I was generally supportive of and applauded the early stripes of foreign policy realism that former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney displayed during the beginning of his campaign.

Romney had a first rate national security advisor in former State Department Policy Planning Director Mitchell Reiss and had others I respect like Nixon Center President Dimitri Simes on his formal advising team...

Harry Reid just announced that he'll include a public option (with a provision that allows individual states to opt out of it) in the version of the health care bill he brings to the floor of the senate. This is a huge (though still partial) victory for progressives. Over the weekend there was a flurry of reporting over whether Reid would include the opt-out provision, or the "trigger" provision favored by Olympia Snowe, which would not create a public option unless and until some time in the future when health insurance costs had not diminished. The fact of the matter is, as David Sirota wrote here, the trigger is simply a way to kill the public option. Had Reid included it in the floor bill, progressives would have had to muster 60 votes to pass an amendment to strip the trigger out and replace it with the opt-out language. There's no way they would have been able to do that...