Dealing with the deficit

As I have noted before, and as many others have also noted with alarm, the U.S. Federal deficit is the "elephant in the room" that all politicians in both parties are trying to ignore. Yet it is a very serious problem, and will take serious (and probably unpopular) moves to get it under control. This graph, based on the Congressional Budget Office's own calculations, which are conservative, because Congress makes them include all sorts of unlikely "savings" in their projections, lays out the problem starkly. The "outlays" line is headed to the roof under the present administration's current budget plans:

Thus far few politicians have offered serious proposals. Rep. Paul Ryan is about the only exception (see his proposals here), but thus far the only response from his colleagues on either side of the aisle has been to ridicule his proposal, not to suggest alternatives.

The Brookings Institute and the New America Foundation have jointly issued a new report outlining a strategy for getting our deficit back down to a manageable level (about 60% of the country's gross domestic product) within the next decade and a half. You can read the whole report here. It won't be popular - quite naturally it requires severe cuts in government spending and higher taxes, and since Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid entitlement programs are by far the largest part of the problem, it will certainly involve unpopular cuts in those programs. And it certainly won't be anything the Obama administration will ever support, committed as they are to increasing the size of government rather than cutting it.

Nonetheless, it is time - indeed, far past time - to begin to have a serious national and political debate about what to do about this problem.