Following up on our press release about the President's Fiscal Year 2011 budget proposal, here are a few more thoughts:

Annual discretionary spending:

• A major element of the Obama administration’s 2015 deficit reduction goal is a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending (FY 2011-2013). While the portion of the budget covered by the freeze is less than 20 percent, it would still save an estimated $29 billion in 2015 alone, and $249 billion over 10 years.

• Clearly, more must be done and even doing this will prove difficult. Nevertheless, The Concord Coalition supports the proposed freeze and, given current economic circumstances, agrees that it is appropriate to begin implementation in 2011. Concord also agrees that the freeze should not be across-the-board. Some programs may merit an increase while others can be cut. An aggregate freeze, as proposed, would help to set priorities and reduce waste.

• War costs in the budget are likely underestimated. In keeping with last year’s budget, the administration has included annual placeholder sums of $50 billion for war costs beyond 2012. While it is...

It’s a little amusing to see how badly the idea of a bipartisan fiscal commission has frightened some partisans at both ends of the political spectrum. That alone indicates the idea may have merit.

Some skeptics, of course, doubt that a special bipartisan panel would have any hope of success in steering the government onto a more responsible fiscal course. And there’s no question that this would be a very tough assignment.

But the strident opposition to a bipartisan commission from some critics on both the right and the left is rooted in fears that such a panel might actually succeed. They describe commission proposals in conspiratorial terms, as though serious bipartisan planning for the nation’s future would be merely a cover for shady plots to sneak reprehensible policies past Congress and the American public. Oh, the deceit of it all...

The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently ran an editorial conceding that “current federal commitments are unsustainable, starting with $37 trillion in unfunded Medicare liabilities.”

Yet the editorial ruled out a bipartisan commission that could tackle this...

Here are a few initial thoughts from The Concord Coalition about the House of Representatives health care bill (H.R. 3962) and the preliminary scoring of that bill by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):

• It does not appear that this bill would alter the unsustainable trend of federal health care spending, often referred to as “bending the cost curve.” [1] According to CBO, “On balance, during the decade following the 10-year budget window, the bill would increase both federal outlays for health care and the federal budgetary commitment to health care, relative to the amounts under current law.” [2]

• CBO does not make a projection of national health care expenditures (public and private) and it’s unclear if the bill would have a major impact on lowering private costs. All the usually discussed efforts to accomplish that are present in the bill, (accountable care demonstration project; medical home pilot, comparative effectiveness research and wellness,) but these score as a cost in the first 10 years. CBO does not include a specific analysis of how these initiates might play out over time and it would, in fact, be very difficult to do so. Thus, the long-term effect of these policies is highly uncertain, at best. This is the risk of expanding...

The big news this week on the health care front was the release of the Senate Finance Committee's initial draft of its health care legislation. The big interest in the budget world with this development is that it marked the first complete reform legislation with a score from CBO that shows deficit reduction, not only during the 10-year budget window but also in the years beyond.

While this is encouraging, there are a lot of caveats to keep in mind about where we are in the process. One is that the bill leaves out a quite expensive item--a fix to doctor payments under Medicare--that costs hundreds of billions. That "fix" is included in the House bill where it is not paid for. Another caveat is that the proposed Medicare Commission, an idea we at Concord support, is seemingly having more restrictions placed on it at every turn. Finally, the legislation still has a long way to go and just one amendment at some point could change the CBO scoring dramatically. Furthermore, the other bills the Finance Committee's have to be merged or conferenced with do not appear as fiscally responsible (...