By the time President Obama walked off the stage at Chicago\u2019s McCormick Place after delivering his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, pundits already were screaming HERE COMES THE FISCAL CLIFF!<\/p>\n And while it might have been a nice idea to take a collective breath after such a divisive election season before new screeching began, the pundits were not wrong.<\/p>\n Be warned: The Fiscal Cliff approaches. On Jan. 2, 2013, to be exact.<\/p>\n Now, I am many things, but an economist (or even a person remotely comfortable with numbers) is not one of them. So let me explain to those of you who are like me, in the simplest terms possible, what this proverbial cliff is all about.<\/p>\n In the wake of the debt ceiling crisis last summer, Congress and President Obama agreed to enter into negotiations to enact a 10-year deficit reduction package in excess of $1.2 trillion.<\/p>\n If an agreement could not<\/i> be reached, a mandatory, across-the-board reduction in spending<\/i> (also known as \u201csequester\u201d or \u201csequestration\u201d) would occur. All discretionary and entitlement spending \u2014 with a few exceptions \u2014 would be subject to sequestration.<\/p>\n Half of the reductions would be drawn from defense funding and the balance from non-defense and entitlement programs. The idea behind the sequestration threat was that it would make the political price so high for both sides that surely Congress and the president would find a common solution.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, no deal has been reached and the United States now faces said \u201cfiscal cliff,\u201d due to sequestration, the expiration of the 2001\/2003 tax cuts, and the expiration of other large and expensive programs. There is little doubt that going over the fiscal cliff would plunge the U.S. economy back into recession.<\/p>\n So there\u2019s that, i.e., nobody wants a recession. But we can\u2019t fix this problem by increasing poverty \u2014 particularly among the poorest of the poor.<\/p>\n Many of you know that I recently returned from a trip to Ethiopia with ONE Moms,<\/a> a project of the ONE Campaign <\/a>that brought a dozen mothers from the U.S. and Europe to visit projects, funded by international aid (much of it from the U.S. and the U.K.) that have made significant and lasting impacts for good on the lives of women and girls.<\/p>\n