Today President Obama released his fiscal 2014 budget proposal, which set a record for arriving two months after the legal deadline of the first Monday in February. Here are the top five things to know about the new budget.

The first of three presidential debates is scheduled for Wednesday. We don't know precisely what topics the candidates will cover, but we can make some educated guesses. And one reader from Duluth, Minnesota, wrote in to ask us about a likely topic: the much-debated 2009 stimulus package, which greatly increased federal spending for several years. The president and his team were famously over-optimistic about how quickly the economy would recover, but that's a separate issue from whether or not the stimulus helped ease the devastating effects of the downturn. Here's the low-down.