"Chuck Hagel’s leadership of our military would be historic," he said. "He’d be the first person of enlisted rank to serve as Secretary of Defense, one of the few secretaries who have been wounded in war, and the first Vietnam veteran to lead the department. As I saw during our visits together to Afghanistan and Iraq, in Chuck Hagel our troops see a decorated combat veteran of character and strength. They see one of their own."

The President and Hagel have known each other for nearly a decade and served together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hagel spent two terms in the upper chamber of Congress and helped to lead the fight for passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Under President Reagan, Hagel served as a deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration, and while co-founding his own business, he served as the CEO of the United Service Organization. He's also co-chaired the Intelligence Advisory Board for President Obama.

"Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction," President Obama said. "He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that’s something we only do when it’s absolutely necessary."

At the event, Sen. Hagel thanked the President for the opportunity to again serve the United States and its men and women in uniform.

"These are people who give so much to this nation every day with such dignity and selflessness," he said. "This is particularly important at a time as we complete our mission in Afghanistan and support the troops and military families who have sacrificed so much over more than a decade of war."

Watch video of the event: 

Learn more:

• Read about President Obama's nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA.
• President Obama has tapped John Kerry to serve as Secretary of State.

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As part of his balanced approach to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion, President Obama proposes to raise $1.6 trillion in new revenue over 10 years for deficit reduction, including $1 trillion from the expiration of the Bush high-income and estate tax cuts. The President’s plan asks the wealthy to pay their fair share by raising tax rates for the wealthiest 2% to the level they were at under President Clinton—39.6%—which was a time when we created 23 million new jobs.  It also prevents an income tax increase for 98% of Americans and 97% of small businesses. 

Some have suggested that, rather than raising tax rates for the most fortunate, policymakers should make up the revenue by cutting high-income tax benefits – in particular, by imposing a dollar cap on itemized deductions, including charitable contributions.

But what is clear is that proposals that take tax rates off the table would threaten donations to universities, non-profit hospitals, social services providers, arts and cultural institutions and other nonprofit organizations.  This is because – to make the math work – these proposals rely on hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue that would result from drastically cutting or eliminating the charitable deduction as we now know it.

Currently, the tax code encourages gifts to charity by allowing taxpayers to claim itemized deductions for charitable giving. But – as a new report by the National Economic Council (NEC) shows, the most prominent dollar cap proposals would effectively eliminate the charitable deduction for up to 13 million households and for as much as 60 percent of currently deductible giving.

Using Congressional Budget Office assumptions, the NEC estimates that a $50,000 cap would reduce charitable giving by about $150 billion over 10 years, while a $25,000 cap would reduce giving by about $200 billion. Even a $25,000 cap that applied only to high-income households would reduce giving by at least $10 billion per year. As the report discusses, a cap could impact nonprofit organizations in every sector and in every state.

The reality of the math means that taking tax rate increases, for the most fortunate, off the table forces a choice between virtually eliminating the charitable deduction for high-income households; raising taxes on middle-class families; or raising too little revenue for deficit reduction and forcing deep cuts to investments in research, education, and infrastructure or to other federal programs important to middle-class or struggling families.

This wholly unnecessary trade-off can be avoided by taking the President’s balanced approach. The President would raise $1 trillion by letting the Bush high-income and estate tax cuts expire. He would then raise additional revenue by limiting all high-income tax benefits to 28 percent.

Under the President’s proposal, every family that currently benefits from the charitable deduction would continue to receive a significant tax incentive for charitable giving. High-income households would receive the same incentive as households with incomes in the range of $200,000, the same incentive they received under President’s Reagan’s tax reform, and a larger incentive than they would get under Republican proposals to reduce the top tax rate to 25 percent.

Solving the Nation’s deficit and debt challenges will require that the highest-income households pay more. But under a more balanced approach that includes an increase in tax rates, this can be achieved without imposing major collateral damage on charitable giving and jeopardizing the vital work of those nonprofit organizations that serve the needs of millions of Americans.

The Fed hopes doing this may buy us a little temporary economic growth by supplying banks with extra cash which they could then lend out to businesses. But it’s far from certain this will even work. After all, the problem isn’t that banks don’t have enough cash on hand – it’s that they don’t want to lend it out, because they don’t trust the current economic climate.

And if it doesn’t work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What’s the end game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? Do we have any guarantees that QE2 won’t be followed by QE3, 4, and 5, until eventually – inevitably – no one will want to buy our debt anymore? What happens if the Fed becomes not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort?

All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher. And it’s not just groceries.

Oil recently hit a six month high, at more than $87 a barrel. The weak dollar – a direct result of the Fed’s decision to dump more dollars onto the market – is pushing oil prices upwards. That’s like an extra tax on earnings. And the worst part of it: because the Obama White House refuses to open up our offshore and onshore oil reserves for exploration, most of that money will go directly to foreign regimes who don’t have America’s best interests at heart.

We shouldn’t be playing around with inflation. It’s not for nothing Reagan called it “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man.” The Fed’s pump priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared, and our allies worried. The German finance minister…

Some of the greatest economic shifts in history are associated with big political swings, if not with politicians by name. Think of Hooverism, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reaganism or British Thatcherism. But those are just labels. Things are not as…