Our Medium-Term Deficit Is Solved by a Presidential Promise to Veto Every Bill That Is Not Ten-Year Deficit Neutral
Why Obama did not make such a promise and January 2009 and why he has not repeated it every day is beyond me.
Roberton Williams:
CBO’s Simple Story about the Deficit: A graph on the cover of the Congressional Budget Office’s summer budget update illustrates two policy paths we could pursue over the coming decade. One would essentially keep our deficit manageable through 2021. The other would make things much worse…. [I]f Congress lets the 2001-2003 tax cuts expire in 2013, stops patching the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and allows scheduled cuts in Medicare payments to physicians to occur [or requires offsets]. Under that scenario, the deficit would shrink to just 1.2 percent of GDP, a sustainable level in a healthy economy…. If Congress doesn’t let current law play out for those three policies, the deficit would grow over the decade, reaching a level nearly four times the current law deficit in 2021…. Almost all of the increase in the deficit would come from extending the tax cuts and the interest payments on the debt increase…
