The Deficit Commission’s Budget Proposal
Laicie Olson | Nov 12, 2010 |
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One thing is clear, if the US wants to address the rising deficit, the entire budget must be on the table. What, you say? But that means I’ll have to make some really tough choices and deal with some really tough realities. Well, you can’t always get what you want.
That is the message delivered by the two chairmen of the President’s Deficit Commission on Wednesday. The pragmatic approach, penned by former GOP Senator Alan Simpson and Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, attempts to put partisan politics aside and address that fact that, “America cannot be great if we go broke.”
The proposal totals nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction by 2020 and would:
1) Enact tough discretionary spending caps and cut discretionary spending in fiscal year 2015 to $200 billion below the requested (fiscal 2015) levels in the President’s budget request. Cuts are evenly spread across domestic and defense spending.
Further, the proposal would set up a “firewall” between defense and non-defense (or, they say, security and non-security – which is very different) spending, so money cannot move between the two. This way, as Newsweek points out, “a failure to cut defense could not be made up for with cuts to, say, food stamps.”
Security Matters, Deficit Commission, Defense Spending (all tags)
