M Paquette
Moderator Emeritus
Here's an interesting simulator, that provides a pretty fair smorgasbord of budget cutting and taxation options, and asks you to simply shave a projected US debt in 2018 from 66% of GDP to 60%. That sounds like a pretty small change. It's harder than it looks, particularly if you think of yourself as a politician up for re-election and not wanting to upset your constituents or campaign contributors too much. The 66% baseline assumes current law applies, such as the tax cuts expiring this year.
Budget Simulator | Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
It's not perfect, but it will give you a good feel for the sorts of options that can be implemented, and what their impact is.
I thought I'd bring this up after a dinner-table conversation last night where someone insisted that correcting welfare fraud would bring the budget into balance. (It wouldn't. The entire set of federal welfare programs is around 15% of total federal spending, or 36% of the annual deficit for 2010. Assume a fairly absurd 20% fraud rate is removed, and you've closed 7% of the deficit.)
It's interesting to play with this and see what various campaign promises and political drums being beaten actually do. It's pretty hard to come up with reasonable results without touching our Social Security and Medicare entitlements.
Budget Simulator | Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
It's not perfect, but it will give you a good feel for the sorts of options that can be implemented, and what their impact is.
I thought I'd bring this up after a dinner-table conversation last night where someone insisted that correcting welfare fraud would bring the budget into balance. (It wouldn't. The entire set of federal welfare programs is around 15% of total federal spending, or 36% of the annual deficit for 2010. Assume a fairly absurd 20% fraud rate is removed, and you've closed 7% of the deficit.)
It's interesting to play with this and see what various campaign promises and political drums being beaten actually do. It's pretty hard to come up with reasonable results without touching our Social Security and Medicare entitlements.