July 3, 2009

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Aging, Costs, and Interaction
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 12:15 PM

It has almost become axiomatic that growing health care costs, rather than population aging, is the overwhelming cause of a projected spike in federal spending. That notion was dispelled in CBO’s Long-Term Budget Outlook published last week. As explained in the report:

“Federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will grow relative to the economy both because health care spending per beneficiary is projected to increase and because the population is aging. Spending on Medicare and Medicaid will be driven by both factors, while Social Security spending will rise because of the population’s aging. Between now and 2035, aging is projected to make the larger contribution to the growth of spending for those three programs as a share of GDP. After 2035, continued increases in health care spending per beneficiary are projected to dominate the growth in spending for the three programs.”

 

Later in the report, CBO quantifies the relative effects of aging and health care growth on projected...

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PAYGO is Simple: Just Pay for What You Want!
Thursday, June 25, 2009 - 9:30 AM

After reading this post, hopefully all of our loyal readers will finally understand the simplicity and beauty of the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) concept. 

First, I should mention that today we published an issue brief on the new statutory PAYGO law proposed by President Obama and introduced in the House of Representatives to coincide with today's PAYGO hearing in the House Budget Committee, featuring OMB Director Orszag. This proposal puts in place a law that requires any new spending or tax cut legislation to be offset so that it does not increase the deficit. If it did, the law forces automatic spending cuts designed to balance out the difference.

The Concord Coalition supports enactment of statutory PAYGO. The basic message in our brief is that PAYGO can be, and has been in the past, an important budget enforcement tool that helps promote fiscal responsibility. However, PAYGO shouldn't be thought of as more than that, and certainly not as a silver bullet that can somehow solve the nation's long-term fiscal...

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Youth Spreading the Word
Monday, June 22, 2009 - 10:05 AM

On June 15 and June 16, leaders from various youth organizations traveled to Washington, D.C. for a youth conference hosted by The Concord Coalition and the Youth Entitlements Summit (YES), and underwritten by The Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The event aimed to encourage public discourse among the "Millennial generation" about the nation's fiscal challenges and to generate a collective plan of action for grassroots efforts to do the same. 

Last month, at an event for young activists, I found myself on the spot once I mentioned The Concord Coalition’s work on fiscal awareness. A fellow attendant replied, “Look, I’m not trying to be rude, but I just don’t think the debt matters.” Such indifference concerned me until I watched America’s future leaders passionately discussing the need to fix this imbalance to save our economic futures.

On the first day of the conference, we heard from politicians and scholars who are heavily involved in the fiscal policy arena, including the...

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Statutory PAYGO Important But Not Cure All
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 - 7:31 PM

Today, President Obama held a press conference with Congressional leaders to announce his support for enactment of a statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rule.

The Obama administration’s proposal looks to build off the PAYGO rules put in place during the 1990s. Similar to them in design, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would keep a running scorecard for the costs associated with enacted legislation for each year through 2014 and compare those costs to the established baseline. If the scorecard found the cumulative effect of enacted legislation to increase the deficit, OMB would be required to reduce spending in certain non-exempt mandatory programs to balance the difference -- a process called sequestration. Although sequestration under PAYGO was never actually ordered in the 1990's, the existence of this automatic trigger provides some incentive for members of Congress to be fiscally disciplined.

While PAYGO has recently been in place for a few years, it has only existed as a congressional rule which has often been waived or ignored for legislation requiring politically difficult trade-offs. The proposal that President Obama put forward, and that the...

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Obama Treasury Describes the Bush/Obama Tax Cuts
Friday, June 5, 2009 - 1:30 PM

I looked at the Treasury Department’s “green book” on the Administration’s revenue proposals only a few days ago, curious to see how the Bush (soon-to-be Obama) tax cuts would be described, considering that they comprise the single most costly policy in President Obama’s proposed budget (about $2 trillion over ten years according to CBO). Seems like a pretty significant “revenue proposal” to describe, right? The Treasury green book is 131 pages long, with each tax proposal described fairly thoroughly, over the course of 1 to a few pages each, in terms of current-law treatment, reason for change, and the specifics on the President’s proposal. Yet the extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is described in exactly two places–first, as a footnote in the table of contents (note, through the emphasis added, how...

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