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Watching the recent Strengthening of America forums online from my office in Wyoming, I was encouraged by how former Democratic and Republican members of Congress, Cabinet secretaries and other national experts could find such so much common ground on a course for fixing the national debt.

As the western states regional director for The Concord Coalition, I was struck by how this matches what Concord has found working with local leaders and the public here in the West and across America.

It also matches recent statements by national associations of mayors and state officials. While there remain some differences on details, it became evident that there is a much more bipartisan agreement than one sees from watching the 2012 political campaigns.

Four public forums were presented in Washington and New York City between September 12 and October 1 by Strengthening of America – Our Children’s Future, a bipartisan initiative co-sponsored by The Concord Coalition.

These forums featured a diverse collection of business leaders, former members of Congress and former government officials. They identified the key components to a comprehensive fiscal solution: tax reform that generates more revenue for deficit reduction, slower growth in health care costs, sustainable Social Security and Medicare programs,...

The latest version of our budget game, the Federal Budget Challenge, has been online for only two weeks, yet has been played by over 5,000 people from almost half of the states in the nation. The Challenge lets players examine over 50 different policy choices, along with their budgetary impacts over 10 years, and decide for themselves whether and how they would reduce the nation’s budget deficits.

The new version, built with our partners from the California-based non-profit Next 10, is now touch-screen playable and has built-in integration with Twitter and Facebook. Like the previous version, as well as the group exercises it was based on -- Principles and Priorities and Debt Busters -- the Challenge offers the opportunity to learn about many of the public policy options being debated in Washington, along with arguments for and against each choice.

The choices already being made by players are quite interesting in that the least and most popular selections are deeply intertwined with the political brinksmanship threatening to push the nation into economic turmoil with the looming “fiscal cliff” at the end of December. 

The most unpopular choice is the policy...

This week The Concord Coalition and several other organizations kicked off an initiative called Strengthening of America – Our Children’s Future focused on the nation's worsening fiscal situation. Former Senators Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) have convened a bipartisan group of former members of Congress for a series of forums in the weeks leading up to the presidential debates. Nunn and Rudman are Concord’s co-chairs.

Speakers at the first forum emphasized that the most difficult problems are more political than economic.

The country has the strength and capacity to deal with its budget challenges, they said. It is the political will to act that is in question, with many elected officials reluctant to make difficult choices and seek bipartisan cooperation.

James A. Baker III, a former Treasury secretary, said in the forum on Wednesday that a grand bargain to put the country on a more responsible path would require “something that’s become a dirty word” in Washington: “Compromise.” He called for a “heroic effort” to achieve such a deal for the sake of the country’s future.

Last week the Tax Policy Center (TPC) released this distributional analysis of the Romney tax plan, exploring how the plan could be made revenue-neutral, as Romney has claimed it would be.  The TPC analysis found that it is impossible to pay for Romney’s proposed additional tax cuts (which are skewed heavily toward upper-income households ) with base-broadening revenue offsets (which according to the Romney plan cannot include increasing the taxation of capital income) without increasing tax burdens on net for most Americans.

What does the TPC analysis actually tell us about the Romney tax plan?  It’s well summarized in Figure 2 of the TPC paper, which decomposes the bottom-line conclusion that a revenue-neutral Romney plan would give generous tax cuts to households with incomes above $250,000, paid for with net tax increases on everyone else, into two parts:

(i) how much the tax cuts from the tax rate reductions are skewed toward wealthier households, and

(ii) how much the revenue offsets from (Romney-limited) base-broadening are skewed toward lower- and middle-income households.

 Combined, we would end up with a revenue-neutral (relative to a business-as-...