Bowles-Simpson V2

[Midpack]

Obviously we can't and shouldn't debate it here, but it would be nice if we could just get off fiscal dead center...

Quote:

Four Steps to Deficit Reduction (2014-2023) Step 1: Reduce Defense and Non-Defense Discretionary Spending (~$1.85 trillion) • Enact immediate reductions in discretionary spending levels (Oct 2010-Apr 2011) • Impose ten-year caps to reduce and limit the growth of discretionary spending (Aug 2011) Step 2: Increase Revenue Collection and Enact Minor Additional Spending Cuts (~$850 billion) • Allow the upper-income tax cuts to expire, generally for income above $450,000 (Jan 2013) • Make minor reductions in discretionary caps and Medicare provider payments (Jan 2013) Step 3: Enact Serious Tax and Entitlement Reforms and Cut Additional Spending (~$2.4 trillion) • Reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending by improving provider and beneficiary incentives throughout the health care system, reducing provider payments, reforming cost-sharing, increasing premiums for higher earners, adjusting benefits to account for population aging, reducing drug costs, and getting better value for our health care dollars (Feb-Dec 2013) • Enact comprehensive, pro-growth tax reform that eliminates or scales back most tax expenditures, with a portion of savings from tax expenditures dedicated to deficit reduction and the additional savings used to reduce rates and simplify the tax code (Feb-Dec 2013) • Strengthen limits on discretionary spending (Feb-Dec 2013) • Reduce non-health mandatory spending by reforming farm subsidies, modernizing civilian and military health and retirement programs, imposing various user fees, reforming higher education spending, and making other changes (Feb-Dec 2013) • Adopt chained CPI for indexing and achieve savings from program integrity (Feb-Dec 2013) Step 4: Make Social Security and Highway Funding Solvent and Medicare Sustainable • Require reforms on a separate track to make Social Security sustainably solvent (2013) • Require a highway bill to bring transportation spending and revenues in line (2014) • Require additional reforms of federal health care programs if necessary to limit the growth of the per beneficiary federal health commitment to close to GDP growth (2018)

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