 Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm really pleased today to be reintroducing our project, US Budget Watch, which is something that we started last campaign season. The purpose of this project is clearly to focus on the important fiscal impacts of campaign promises as the campaign unfolds. And last time around it was a big success in that it was heralded by CNN as the most detailed analysis of McCain and Obama's budget plans coming from the Nonpartisan Committee for the Responsible Federal Budget. That's exactly what we want. We want the focus of this to be to look at all the campaign promises that get made throughout the campaign through a nonpartisan lens. And just look at the bottom line how they affect the deficit and debt. And so today what we are unveiling is our first major policy report of this campaign, primary numbers, the GOP candidate and the national debt. And the project I should really clarify because it's so important during heated campaigns, emphatically nonpartisan. Our board of directors, many of whom are here today and we'll be talking on our panel about this, are the leading budget experts in the country. They have led CBO, OMB, the Treasury Department, the Fed, the Budget Committees. And all of them look at this from either a nonpartisan or a partisan perspective on fiscal responsibility. But we come together as an organization and don't think about this through a political lens at all. And so that is really our number one commitment to bring the numbers out, make them transparent, provide something for voters to use during a campaign where this issue is obviously going to be critically important. Let me also tell you what this project is not. Today's report is not the end of the story. One of the important things to know is that all the campaigns are continuing to develop and fill in and alter their proposals as they go along. And this will be kind of a living, breathing document as the campaign proceeds. We will update the numbers. We will fill them in. We will work with the campaigns. We are really pleased last time around that the way this worked is we sat down with the campaigns, with their advisors, went through the numbers, understood all of them, tried to create a very useful voter guide, and also when asked, gave ideas on what things affect fiscal policies in different ways. So we look at ourselves as a resource as well as something that provides information for voters. It's certainly not the end of the story, though. And we will be providing other policy reports. For instance, one thing we don't do in this report, we don't look at the long term effects of all the policy promises. And clearly because of the fiscal situation, things like social security reform, Medicare reform, which would likely be phased in more gradually, are critically important to the fiscal health of the country. And so we'll issue another report down the road on the long term effects, how the fiscal promises would affect things beyond the eight year. We look at all of these numbers kind of in a two term presidential period. So beyond the eight years, what would this look like? Another thing that this project does not is it's not just a mouthpiece for the campaigns. So as I said, we do look closely to what they've put out, what their policies are, how they describe them. But we really go to the impartial sources to get the score. So we look at what CBO has said, the Congressional Budget Office, Joint Tax Committee, GAO, importantly the Tax Policy Center, which is a nonpartisan tax center run by Brookings and Urban and really provides invaluable resources both for this report and beyond in terms of scoring the tax policies for campaigns. So we talk to the campaigns about their own numbers and then we also go beyond and bring to you what the scores from those outside experts are. And in many cases we have to come up with our own scores from our models as well. So we're very transparent where these all come from. And for that reason, we also have different scores based on low debt, medium debt and high debt scenarios. We'll talk about those in just a second. Finally, what this also is not is a comparison to President Obama. We will do that. We will look at how the Republican nominee and President Obama's plans look and go through all of them together. But right now, we thought it was important to recognize that in the Republican primary and the primary, the work's not finished yet. We will continue as we did yesterday to see new proposals coming out of the different campaigns, just like the Romney campaign came out with some new tax proposals yesterday. We'll update those and we'll bring President Obama's numbers into this picture. We do do an analysis of the President's budget, things like that. But what we will bring is an apples to apples comparison when the time is right, because it is fair and important to recognize that the Republicans are still building out their proposals. So what this is, is it's our best analysis, our best attempt to make transparent the promises the campaigns have made. I mean, one very useful resource is you can just go through this report and see what all the policies on the tax and spending side that have been promised what they are. And to look at those overall effects on the bottom line. So before I jump into the meat of what they've given, what they've put out, I do want to make two very special thank yous to our project director, Jeff Anke, who has run this entire project and really done a phenomenal job of digging into every policy. He's not here today with us because he's vacationing with his family well deserved after many, many long nights of this. But he's been invaluable and is new to the committee for responsible federal budget. And our ever critical important policy director, Mark Goldwein, who has shepherded this project along with so many others for the committee and really just knows these numbers, knows these policies and knows the economics behind them better than anybody else. So thank you so much to the two of them and all the other staff at the committee who've put together this great report. So I now want to move on to the policies. If we have somebody who's moving the slides, oh, is it me? It's me. Well, we might not be able to move on. Let's see. Okay. So just to back up a little bit and anybody who's come to committee events before is sort of familiar with our unwavering focus on this important issue. But why does it matter so much? Obviously, the country's debt is nearing historical levels. It's well beyond the historical average, which was below 40% of GDP, and it's headed in a dangerous direction. Undeniably, it's now on a path which would result in a fiscal crisis if we're not to make changes. So what we decided to do was look at the debt levels. Debt is so important for how markets respond, the economic effects of the fiscal situation of the country, to look at how the debt levels would change over that eight-year, roughly eight-year period for each of the candidate's promises. And we start with what we call the CRFB, the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget's realistic baseline. What we do is we assume that all of the tax cuts would be extended. This isn't our policy preferences. It's just the realistic base beginning point to compare things against. So we assume that all of the tax policies would be extended, the tax cuts, excuse me, would be extended. We assume that as it has been in the past, the alternative minimum tax would be patched. The DOCFIX, or Sustainable Growth Rate, part of Medicare, would be patched. We assume the drawdown of the warm wars. And finally, we assume that the sequester would not go into place. And that is our starting point against which we compare all of the policies. In terms of how we make those comparisons, there are three scenarios and they are based on three critical differences. But we have low debt, intermediate debt, and high debt. And the differences are based on these three critical things. One, which is the level of specificity of any policy. We score it very differently if somebody says we will cut spending or we will cut spending by doing X, Y, and Z. Because, of course, it's great to talk about cutting spending and cutting the deficit. And the hard part of all this is being willing to get specific and allowing the country to have a discussion about the trade-offs inherent in all of this. And there's so much talk, there's so much discussion about this election, about out of this all coming a mandate on what to do about fiscal policy. I have no idea whether that will be the result of this election. I suppose I could see realistically, as much as there being a mandate for how to fix our budget situation, there being plenty of promises about what not to do. I won't cut spending. I won't raise taxes. I won't do anything that ultimately will have to be done to fix the situation. And we think it's important to recognize that the more specific a candidate is willing to be about how they would get something done, the more likely it is to actually take place. Because again, it's a lot easier to say I would cut spending by X trillion dollars than to specify how that would happen. So we recognize those differences in the different debt scenarios. Secondly, we look at differences between scoring of those outside credible sources which I mentioned, CBO, joint tax, the tax policy center, and the candidate's own scores. So if there is a difference in how they estimate something would save, how much it would save, usually the estimate is that it would save more than those outside sources, and an estimate that comes from other places, we recognize those in the different scenarios as well, giving candidates credit for their own scores in the low debt scenario, but not the others. Finally, if the policy parameters are left vague, for instance, what would be the timing of phasing something in, then we recognize those different scenarios and play out the different debt situations. So in general, we're going to give them the more specific they are. Two other things just to take note of that we don't do. We aren't able to capture any effects of long-term proposals, as I mentioned, when they come in this window of time. We will look at other, we will look through other reports at the effects of long-term reforms. It's critically important that those be recognized, but in standard budget scoring, and in the way we do this, they don't show up in a short term unless you actually make those changes in the first decade or so. So we weren't able to capture those here. Secondly, true to convention, the way that CBO and joint tax score things, we don't look at macro-dynamic effects of tax policies. So when you lower tax rates, it may well contribute to economic growth. That isn't captured in the scores that we use. We do, however, look at the micro-dynamic effects, the behavioral effects. So it does have effects when people change tax policy in people's behavior. That's captured, but the overall dynamic effects are very different. I'm sure that the campaigns will say their tax proposals would generate economic growth, and that in many cases is true, but it's not captured in the way that we do scoring conventionally, and so we reflect those conventions for scoring. This is just a quick summary of the deficits under all of the candidates' proposals. I would note, there's a lot of talk about balancing the budget, sort of the last cycle of fiscal responsibility, that was the objective of the budget. I would point out that none of the candidates balance the budget, and nor is the budget ever balanced under our realistic baseline in the year that this is captured, and that's reality. Unfortunately, we're not in a place where it's likely the budget's going to be balanced in the near term, unless there's very high levels of economic growth, which would be tremendously helpful, but we shouldn't count on them, and so we think that we should understand the differences between the candidates, but also to understand that really the focus of most of this is on how you get the debt to a manageable level, and one of the things we've talked about at the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget is how you get the debt to where it's not growing faster than the economy overall, and that's one of the metrics a lot of people want to focus on. So let's just quickly go through the individual candidates, and then we'll look at some of the real issues in campaigns. First, we'll look at candidate Gingrich, and so what you see under the three scenarios, and I'm going to focus on the middle line and the intermediate debt scenario, since that's the one that reflects the balance between those three different levels of specificity and policy parameters and the campaign's estimates that we think is the best one to focus on. If you compare where we're headed it's likely to be 85% of GDP. Under Gingrich's proposals, the debt would increase by $7 trillion compared to that amount, and the debt levels would reach 114% of GDP. Now clearly there are ranges, it could be higher or lower than that, but actually under all of the scenarios by our projections from the policies so far, it would increase the debt rather significantly. You all have the report, and the report is posted online right now or about to be both at usbudgetwatch.org and crfb.org so you can pull up the report there if you're watching this on television rather than in person, but as you can see in the report we'll go through all the specific policies but just to focus on a couple of the major ones from candidate Gingrich. The largest tax policies which would lose revenue in this case are a two-tiered tax system an alternative tax of 15% as a flat tax which would have a significant effect on the bottom line, and second a reduction in corporate taxes down to 12.5% top rate which is a significant cut. In terms of the spending, most of the savings under this plan come from block granting Medicaid and eliminating or cutting about a hundred other means tested programs and there's also reforms to Social Security of implementing private accounts which is something that would have more savings over time, but in the short run because it diverts money into the Social Security accounts is extremely costly. On candidate Paul overall we find that he would actually reduce the debt compared to our standardized baseline by $2.2 trillion and that the debt levels compared to our 85% starting point would come down to 76% of GDP at the end of the two terms that we're looking at. In the range as well there's only one scenario, the high debt scenario where he would actually increase the debt, but generally the debt comes down and he does have tax policies that cut taxes both in costly tax cuts on the income tax which actually he would rather repeal and make unconstitutional, but in the interim he just gets rid of a lot of components of the income tax and retues his corporate taxes as well, but he's very specific in the spending cuts that he would look at. He would eliminate a number of agencies with specific cuts that he identifies out there, make block grants, cut defense and you go through all the spending cuts and in most cases we find that that would outweigh his tax cuts. Moving on to candidate Romney. Romney's plan, and this is one of the things the campaign has said that they intend to do, but we find it's basically deficit neutral. Now again there's a huge range but overall in the intermediate situation we find that it would just be a marginal increase of $250 billion it's not really marginal number, but over 10 years certainly due to scoring it's basically deficit neutral and that the range depending on how the tax plan would work were just filling in the new details and we will actually update this proposal for many of the new details that came out yesterday from the campaign about their new tax proposal but he offers a number of reforms to the tax code including income and corporate. Many of these are offset particularly by base broadening efforts and on the spending side similar to some of the other proposals there would be block grants, cuts in the workforce cuts in domestic discretionary spending and we were told that there will be more in entitlement reform which again will probably be more affecting the long term. So the range here is that it could basically be deficit neutral go down to as low as 75% of GDP by the end of the period or up as high as 94% of GDP. But this range is pretty much tighter than a number of the others that we've seen. Then finally candidate Centaurim's proposal so there's major cuts again in income taxes and corporate taxes under this proposal and they would have a negative effect on the overall deficit impact. At the same time the candidate does have a significant emphasis on entitlement reform and in fact is the only candidate that actually starts to make some of these changes within the window. So you start to see these changes become phased in earlier on and they're starting to be more specific about what they would look like. Like other candidates you also see block grants. Candidate Centaurim talks about freezing defense and he identifies a number of other cuts. There's the biggest issue here is that he talks about cutting $5 trillion from spending but doesn't get specific about where that $5 trillion would come from. And so the numbers are highly dependent on whether you score that as a cut or not. And again so we looked at that and we scored that as a cut in our low debt scenario not the other two. And it's a tremendous difference between cutting the overall deficits over that period compared to our baseline by just over $2.5 trillion compared to adding to them of $4.5 trillion. So one of the things we'll see is whether it becomes more specific how you'd spend that $5 trillion in cuts which would obviously have a very strong impact on the bottom line. The range here is that in the low debt scenario debt would end at 74% of GDP. High debt scenario it's up as high as 107% of GDP. So again that will be the biggest kind of thing to watch for whether those $5 trillion get filled out. So what I'd like to do now is people can have time to look a little bit at the report. We can talk more specifically about all the proposals. Again I think one of the benefits of this report is it's a voter guide. You now have something where you can look at each candidate and see what specific proposals they've made on the tax side to corporate taxes, to income taxes, to payroll taxes, and on the spending side what have they said about defense? How would they cap discretionary if they would? What specific programs have they put out for elimination? What things would they spend more money on? Of course there's some things that people will spend more money on as well. So you have a voter guide. You have a range of the estimates for the savings or costs that they would all provide. You're able from there to look at the bottom line I really recommend that everybody understand this is a living breathing document and it will change as the campaigns go forward. And in many cases the details will be filled out and the campaigns will provide more information. There may be more savings. There may be less and we will continue to update these. But I think it's really useful really important and we hope beneficial to people to have a resource, an impartial nonpartisan resource that's going to look at the cost of these proposals, that's going to look at the bottom line and that's going to keep the focus on specifics during a campaign that we know is going to have a lot of discussion about fiscal responsibility and here's a way to sort of look at how those numbers add up. So I'm very pleased that we have three of our board members here today if you all would come up. We're joined today by three board members from the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget. Both Vic Fazio and Bill Frenzel are former members of Congress different sides of the aisle both very committed to fiscal responsibility from where they sit and of course there's Alice Rivlin who has headed Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget she's been the vice chair of the Federal Reserve and we're so thrilled to have them involved in the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget and to have them with us today to lead us in a discussion about the fiscal issues in this report but more broadly how during campaign season we talk about fiscal policy and how during specifically this critical campaign we think the issues of fiscal policy are going to unfold what we expect to see, what may happen afterwards everything's open so I look forward to their comments and then we'll have a rich discussion with the audience so thanks again for joining us today. Alice would you kick us off please? Sure Thank you Maya let me stress that my views are mine only and not those of any of the organizations with which I'm associated including this one I think the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget has done a really signal service to the press, the public and to the candidates the proposals at this stage of any campaign are understandably not totally spelled out and you can't imagine how hard analysts have to work to figure out what these proposals actually are and how they would impact the budget the dense footnotes in this document will give you a clue as to how hard the staff worked to make these estimates but there is admittedly much uncertainty at this stage alternative assumptions as Maya has pointed out are necessary and some of the proposals are not primarily budgetary my favorite one from my old Federal Reserve hat is Ron Paul's proposal to end the Federal Reserve what's the impact of that on the budget well the Federal Reserve actually makes money for the treasury so you can say it saves money but think about it if this great nation the largest economy in the world didn't have a central bank what would happen well none of us know but the impact on the budget would be likely to be major but it's inherently unscorable now it's too much at this stage to ask candidates to give you finished proposals with all the details it's not too much to ask that they be fiscally responsible and so I think the questions are the ones that the committee put out as principles earlier this year and they boiled down to do the candidates recognize that the United States budget is on an unsustainable track and that we must take steps to stabilize the debt as Maya pointed out the new definition is can we get the new definition of responsibility is can we get the debt to a point where it is not rising faster than the economy is growing that is a real common sense definition we don't have to balance the budget we just have to get back to a situation in which at least the debt is not rising faster than the economy because anybody whatever your ideology or viewpoint about economics can recognize that a country whose debt is growing faster than its economy can possibly grow is in deep trouble and that's where we are are they making proposals that risk making the debt problem worse well that is I think a major question and are they proposing things that might actually be expected to happen now I am a veteran of two very of the many very serious bipartisan efforts to reign in the debt so I believe that there is no solution to this stabilizing the debt problem that does not involve bending the cost curve in health care reigning in the cost of health care entitlements putting social security back on a soundtrack and raising more revenue from a reformed tax system now I don't expect Republicans to propose raising taxes but it seems to me that one definition of responsibility is can you reform the tax system are you proposing to reform the tax system in whatever way you think is best that at least doesn't make the situation worse and on that score all of these candidates fail they all reduce the revenue available to the U.S. government over time why is that irresponsible because I think it's not realistic to think that we are going to absorb this tsunami of seniors and their need for health care with the revenues that we are on track to have so I would give them low marks on that score they don't make many of them serious proposals on the entitlements on the health entitlements and social security that can be scored in this window this limited eight year window and as Maya has pointed out that's not terribly surprising but why is this a service to the candidates I think it really is it is saying to the candidates from a nonpartisan group what you say matters and this report doesn't have all the scoring answers but it's main contribution I think is going to make the candidates think am I really proposing something that I could do as president or and am I saying something responsible about it and that's a big service now I expect that in the next week Maya is going to get angry phone calls with the campaign they're going to say you didn't understand what we were saying and you didn't give proper credit for this or for that that's terrific that means they're paying attention and that the staff here may have to correct some of the numbers may have to change some of the assumptions but it will start a conversation in the next week. Thank you. Before I turn it over I want to say thank you for that voice of reality of how something like this works which is it's never going to be perfect none of the numbers are ever going to be perfect none of the best scores in the whole city can ever get all this perfect and the focus is to put it out there to add positive pressure to do the right thing to say that people are watching the effects of these promises and they do know how hard it is it's hard to go out there and talk about the real policies that would change the tax code particularly those that would raise revenues that would reduce spending particularly those that are specific and in some ways perhaps this can lend a countervailing force where when people talk about the tough choices that are required they're going to get a positive score for doing so and so it will never be perfect we know that and I'm going to afford those calls to Alice if there's lots of angry candidates but Alice really has spent so much time in different administrations in different roles and knows all the different sides of budgeting and as a result a true national fiscal hero on all of this so thank you Alice Bill Thank you Mayan, thank you Alice thanks to all of you for coming to committee for responsible federal budget we've always worked hard to inform the American people about fiscal promises made by politicians to make sure that those politicians spell out the promises in as much detail as we can get from them this particular analysis the primary numbers book that you received today isn't important but only a very initial first look at what the Republican candidates and we'll get to President Obama later proposed to get the budget back in shape as the candidates flesh out their plans as Maya indicated we'll be releasing future studies the 212 campaign which we have begun now comes at a crucial budget time it has been explained our deficit and debt trajectory going forward takes us well above any kind of reasonable ratio between debt and GDP currently somewhere north of 70 percent and headed up toward 100 depending on how these the people who are elected in this election react our target has been around 60 percent of GDP to be achieved within a decade and then of course trying to lower it to somewhere near the post war average so that we would at least be in shape to handle emergencies in the may come along in the future candidates in this election can work on the budget issues and that's exactly how they intend to deal with them or in some cases they may not they may simply shout slogans at us or at one another Vic and I have been through this process a few times and in the heat of battle sometimes the tail gets lost and but we're going to do the best we can to be sure that we bring it all to you and we hope that every American understands that you can't solve the problem by cutting what we call improper payments or fraud, waste and abuse we can't solve the problem by eliminating foreign aid or lowering congressional salaries we have to be specific and we have to concentrate on the spending and tax problems that are putting us into the position we're now in there are real ways to get back on track probably won't, we won't hear a lot of them in the primary campaign but as we get into the general we're going to be looking more at process reform and more at details and process of course has always been a favorite subject for the committee for responsible federal budget one of those process reforms is closer attention to a long term budget I've described some of our problems and Maya has indicated that particularly in healthcare and certain other entitlements the long term difficulties need to be looked at and have to be assessed even as we work on our short term budgets we have to start budgeting for the long term with special attention to social security, healthcare and revenues in the short term we have to set goals and establish targets to get that deficit to get that debt down to 60% to stabilize that debt and push it down on a declining path rules aren't the final answer because congress has proved itself willing to break all of its rules help and they point the finger at those who are reneging on the promises in the long term we need to aim to balance the budget it'll take time you've seen in Maya's slides that none of the primary promises on the republican side get us to a balanced budget in 10 years even in the most optimistic estimates of what they are talking about it will take time but we have to get there and it needs to be a goal of ours any of these candidates that we are analyzing today or the president is going to face a tough four year period coming on nobody expects a miraculous recovery we can't recover it's going to take decades nevertheless if we don't start now it's going to be impossible nobody knows where the tipping point will come all we know is it will come and when it comes it will come suddenly and relentlessly the miraculous recovery is going to take a long time fiscal sobriety exists only at the end of a long and difficult road finally in addition to a concrete plan for spending and taxing we should be thinking about the processes that got us into this mess and resolve to try to avoid them as we move forward it's easy for the politicians to make promises again the rules are going to figure importantly in the final solutions they won't save us but they'll be a good help to us thank you thank you so much thank you Maya it's a great honor to be on a panel with Alice and Bill perhaps I need to make a particular disclaimer given the fact that I've had a fairly well known partisan democratic background as a member of congress my ability to sit here and judge objectively republicans running for president may be called into power but I do so as a member of this body because I think under Maya's leadership we brought together a fairly broad based bipartisan group of members who come from different points on the political spectrum but all of whom believe that deficits and debt are an important issue that has to be addressed and so as I began to review the proposals made by these four candidates I looked to this organization's 12 principles of fiscal responsibility that they hope to be injected into the debate in this campaign as a way of going about analyzing what has been put before the voters certainly in the primary states that have been engaged so far first of all I think the top priority is to make deficit reduction a priority and I think we all know the path we're on is unsustainable we've heard a good deal from these candidates about cutting spending but in fact as Maya's charts showed you earlier not much progress in fact some significant harm is done to fight in the way these candidates have made proposals in the effort to reduce spending and reduce debt and to get deficits on a trajectory downward instead of upward this is partly driven by tax proposals that are largely driven in the direction of cutting further at the same time in our history we have an historically low rate of taxation per GDP I think we're in the 15 to 16 percent range spending in the 23 to 24 percent range that gap has to close on all of these tax proposals would widen it spending cuts as we all know are easy to talk about in theory but in reality and in detail they lose a lot of their political luster candidates are loathe to get into the details about spending cuts and so as I looked at some of the proposals that have been made couple of them jumped out at me but as a budget here Newt's talking about this block grant and cutting spending on 100 plus federal programs that are means tested saving 2.4 billion dollars pardon me trillion dollars over time this is a very nice idea but the reality has to be made explicit for the average voter to understand what programs are being discussed there's a general category of spending called reducing improper payments all of these candidates seem to have found a way to save 160 trillion dollars over periods of 10 years this is a huge amount of money and is a frankly undecipherable way of going making reductions Ron Paul talks about ending wars and reducing non-defense spending by huge amounts of money which are completely unavailable in any detail there's no question that cutting federal workforce costs may be a wonderful concept but the idea that Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum and others have put out is completely untethered to some sort of specific fiscal reality there's no detail and that detail is what the voters deserve it's also important that we not perpetuate the budget myths a number of men have been mentioned in the past here deficits and debt don't matter I don't think we're hearing that myth much anymore we haven't heard it really for perhaps 10 years it was often cited during the last administration tax cuts pay for themselves well I think as my indicated earlier there's no question that there is some economic growth based on some tax cut proposals but to have dynamic scoring become a underpinning of how we go about reducing deficits by people believe that tax cuts are actually going to help grow the economy is a canard and it can't be abided with there are those who say cutting waste fraud and abuse will solve all our problems we like to put a plug in for that kind of savings it's illusory it never actually is ever scoreable it's a nice phrase President Reagan made it very popular David Stockman who's part of this organization would tell you how often they came up short in really finding the waste fraud and abuse that had been discussed another one that's really taken on a life of its own is earmarks there is absolutely no way in which earmarks if totally eliminated would reduce spending earmarks are a carve out of what the administration's budget would propose and of course foreign aid on everyone's list for elimination but every president usually fights for more spending in this category we talked about doing an end to nation building that was a very important plank in the prior administration's proposals going forward but of course we spent billions on nation building in the interim Medicare and social security on the left are often cited as programs that are earned benefits and therefore need to sit by themselves and not be included in this debate I think we all realize that they have to be on the table and they have to be reined in and there is no way that they cannot be fundamental to deficit reduction going forward there is no such thing as a free lunch and candidates more often than not perpetuate the myth that somehow these kinds of spending cuts cost a trillion dollars over five years as Rick Santorum has advocated have no downside, have no cost the other thing I think we need to do is refrain from pledges I want to congratulate Steve Lattoret of Ohio for calling for a bonfire of pledges he wants to bring all the pledges that all organizations from left to right require of members who run in party general elections to sign they are the greatest impediment to bringing about the kind of bipartisan solutions that I think we all know will be required if we are to get our debt and deficit on the downward trajectory so I want to encourage congress and the administration and the candidates running on the republican side to get real over the next six to eight months everyone talks about the train wreck that could occur in the lame duck session of this congress when in fact a number of policies are going to be required to be dealt with including the tax cuts that would terminate there is a lot of leverage on both sides a good deal of policy needs to be engaged in Bill and I were talking earlier about the possibility of just a kick the hand down the road scenario in the lame duck session but it won't be long before the next president and the congress have to grapple with these issues so the more specificity the more willingness to be honest about what needs to be done that can occur in the context of this election will make it that much easier for policy makers to find the solutions that are absolutely essential to get us to where we need to go which is in Alice said earlier not a matter of balancing budgets but just getting our trajectory in line with the economic growth of the country so with that I would be interested as I'm sure the other panelists are in discussing some of these in more detail with you thank you so much to all of our panelists that was just spot on and there are two themes I want to draw out that most if not all of you mentioned the first is on specifics and the second is on the long term so it's interesting so Vic you sort of said some of the specifics you didn't find to be realistic and I actually think I'm a little bit more charitable or sensitive to how hard it is to get specific which is why on this low debt scenario we went ahead we gave all the candidates credit for places even where they weren't specific but if you say you're going to cap spending a 20% of GDP I think you should be specific but also I think Alice you pointed out it's very difficult to expect them to be that specific at this point the campaign one because of the political reality of how you are going to get beaten up for it and two they're just getting started they don't have a full government institution kind of backing them giving them all the support scoring their plans like a sitting president does it's very difficult to pull together all of these proposals and when you look at our low debt scenario one of the things that I was actually quite encouraged to see is that three of the four candidates bring the debt down to below where we expect to see it on our realistic baseline so it doesn't bring it down to where it needs to be but it's actually a start in the right direction so part of this is a judgment call for anybody to make for how specific they think they should be but I guess the question I wanted to ask the panelist is what can we expect in terms of specifics right now in a campaign how do you balance the political reality particularly during a primary with the need to create a mandate so that going forward when whoever is in office and is ready to govern can actually look back at what they promised and say well I told the people and they gave me the vote of confidence in voting for me so how do you balance those two jump in Alice well I think there are two things one is how specific do they get and there you can expect them to at least give you examples of what they're talking about vague notions of five trillion dollars which means almost nothing to anybody are I think not responsible but the other thing is I think you have to expect that they would look at whether in the aggregate impact of their proposal is realistic I said I don't think that cutting revenues further is a responsible thing to do and they all do it but I don't think cutting discretionary spending whether specifically or not way below where it is under the cuts that have already been undertaken is a realistic view of what the American public wants and then if you're proposing it then you have to say well what are we really going to do about federal prisons and air traffic control and national parks and all of those things within this total which is so much lower than anything we've had before you know as an appropriator I can say these freezes that we've already put in place have yet to be felt the details have still to be determined by Congress's not yet elected even and so I think as Alice says cutting domestic discretionary spending is a lot easier to do in general than it is in detail and the public will recoil to some degree from a number of the cuts that would be made in programs they care a lot about these cuts will have to be made but to just layer additional cuts on top of those that have already been called for is going to be a lot more difficult than anyone can imagine including many members of Congress who haven't been given the opportunity to sit on the committees that actually have to make these choices but the details are important and we need to get beyond the glittering generalities and talk about specific departments and agencies and functions of government that will need to be reduced to an important level of honesty that the voters really deserve to hear but as Alice implies it's the entitlement programs and the revenue side that have to be addressed and they have to be addressed by both parties and they have to be addressed honestly because I believe ultimately there will be more consensus than you can imagine in this kind of hot political environment that we're involved with right now but I think that that in the primary session it's it gets to be sort of a bidding match between the candidates as to who's going to do I'm going to cut more or I'm going to cut taxes more I think it is not a season in which we expect or are going to get the kind of specificity that we are going to insist on in the general election campaign I think when the Republicans select their candidate then the faceoff between President Obama and the Republican candidate we will have much better luck in demanding specifics from the two of them and obviously it will be Democrats trying to defend entitlements and Republicans trying to defend against tax increases that's to be expected the final solution which most of us here believe has to include both revenues and entitlements we hope there's some sort of a synthesis that only the politicians can negotiate between themselves Bill is more optimistic about the specifics of the general election than I think we have a right to be given the past history that's interesting I keep thinking that wouldn't it be great if in the general election because I do think there's a chance that we'll get more specific there because I think this issue is not going away but I think it's important that voters are well ahead of politicians in this and they would welcome the realistic laying out of what it's going to take to fix this problem but I suppose there are many smart pollsters who would say I'm wrong but I just keep thinking wouldn't it be interesting if we had a debate in the general where we basically laid up the question to the two main candidates how would you save the four to six trillion dollars that all the outside experts have said how you would save that money and actually required that they lay out the kind of plan that we're talking about here it seems less far fetched to me in this election than in the ones past that that could happen because there's so much focus on the issue I think they would probably decline they would not show up well they might but let me make another point about what they might say if they did it would be important to recognize that in that situation both candidates would know that they were entering a negotiation and they would not be expected to put a final solution to say how far would you go on this or that they could only be expected to say here's our opening offer this is what my opening bid would be if I were president and I think that goes for the sitting president the Obama budget of announced recently ought to be seen as the democratic offer in a negotiation yet to happen I think we all regret that the opportunity that Simpson-Bowles provided was not seized upon by the administration I think there's a great deal of regret that the work that Alice and Pete Domenici did was not seized upon by members of Congress or the administration I think there was an effort to get back to it in the discussions the president and Speaker Boehner had but it was unfortunately unattainable we are now I think in a dark period where we're not going to get realistic about bringing together the competing points of view but I do think it has to happen immediately beginning in November after the election and I think those blueprints that are out there will ultimately serve as the basis upon which some agreement will come together there really aren't a lot of other options when you really look at the things that are possible and so I think all the good work that Alice and others have done in the last year will not be for naught well I'm not going to give up on it just because I still believe that if you actually put out a full plan you kind of just made this point Vic it's very difficult to say here's how I would do six trillion dollars in spending if you have to actually say what you would do or how I would do that all through raising revenues just on people making over a million or 250,000 when you have to fill in the details I think it actually starts to forge that compromise because it's very hard to do it on the two ends of the spectrum but we shall see I still think it would be a really interesting debate maybe it would be a short and empty one to switch to the points that all of you also touched upon the importance of the long term and that really is the big theme here of problems that our country faces and the potential solutions that really have to look at what's driving the problem health care costs the largest one the aging of the population a huge contributor and Vic you recognized for the progressive perspective which is sometimes harder to recognize Social Security Medicare reform have to be on the table everybody's talking about the need for a comprehensive plan that looks at everything from tax reform to cuts and spending but entitlement reform has to be a big part of this but it is difficult to have that reflected in the numbers and I think one of the things in our report we focus on the savings in actually less than the first decade how do we focus this overall discussion on longer term savings and I think Alice particularly somebody who's been in charge of the scoring institutions for this country how do we help focus that if you get the longer term spending or fiscal problems under control it actually can buy us some more breathing room in the shorter term where we're still trying to have the economic recovery take hold and I think there's a way to focus attention on that since we all know that's kind of the key problem I hope so but it hasn't happened the theme that seems to me to be missing from all of these budget discussions is the timing we don't need to balance the budget tomorrow if we did it would be a catastrophe for the economy and we're beginning to see in Europe the adverse effects of extreme austerity in the short run what we do need to do is get back on a sustainable track and that mainly means as we've said several times already reigning in the entitlement so they're not driving up federal spending faster than the economy can grow and finding more revenue hopefully by a reformed tax code and the impact of those major changes won't hurt people in the beginning because you don't want to raise taxes right away or cut entitlements right away they will take effect over a longer period and you have to do the scoring for the second decade beyond the 10 year window now that's always very uncertain but it's not that uncertain the idea that you can't do it you have to make some realistic assumptions and then do it but it's quite possible and it's irresponsible not to think about what happens in the second decade if we don't make changes now especially in the entitlements because it takes a long time to phase them in one of the things that I think progressives needs to focus on is the degree to which debt service is increasingly routing out other forms of spending which often go to the least among us to children we have unfortunately without addressing entitlement reform in an extroval intergenerational transfer more money going to older people less money available to go to children to the most needy among us that is I think a considerable result of making no policy changes in the entitlement area and not reining in the debt which of course increasingly costs us annually additional billions of dollars so I hope that progressives could see that that is an important value that they need to hold high as they enter into this debate and ultimately compromise that I think we need to do that. I talked about the long term a bit in my discussions we do need targets for the long term and as we work toward through a decade we need to have enforcement mechanisms that if we do not reach the targets for debt and deficit in each year some kind of a sequester or whatever it takes that the congress has to accept or to override and I think that is wonderful to help us get into the debt stability I think social security and programs that are that long we do have a pretty good idea what the long term outlook he has is a matter of mathematics or political negotiation it is not hard to do you simply have to decide how you want to do it but I think more importantly is to set those long term goals and targets and have some kind of an enforcement mechanism to help you get there they won't guarantee you'll get there but they will help I think it's all really important and I think we will issue the next report or one of our next reports both looking at the long term and I think that's right Bill on the budget enforcement mechanisms that would be part of any plan because we know that the longer out you're making promises the harder it is to know whether they're going to stick and to have a plan for how they might stick would be particularly useful in making them more credible I'd like to open up to the audience for questions there should be microphones somewhere in the middle of and then speak to the microphone so C-SPAN audience and others can hear thank you I'm Jim Moody I've served with several of these people on the panel back to Alice's point about the long term obviously we know it from your counterproductive it is to try to reach budget balance in the short term when you're in the recession but in the long term what is the ultimate optimal deficit of deficit is a form of foreign international trade and it says we're providing a real service store of value to the rest of the world they're parking the money here they're accepting a very low net rate for that we're providing a real store of value they're lending us money the question is what is the balance within that should not be zero the balance budget a zero deficit is not a good idea because that takes away liquidity that we are very helpful for us so is there some sense in which we need to sort of set a long term goal what is the optimum deficit side it certainly is not zero because it's for the trade balance of value that it provides and it's a great question for this group because all three of these panelists are members of the Peterson Pew commission on budget reform where we spent hours and hours in a room that's how much fun we have discussing topics just like that so where you all fall in and what we should be shooting for ultimately Alice well my answer to that question is implicit in what I said about the increase in the debt we should not have a deficit that is more than two or three percent of our GDP because we can't grow the GDP much faster than that and we need, I'm not alarmed about current deficits we're in a deep hole we had a deep recession we need to do the things that will get us out of this recession and we need to keep on doing them until we recover but over the cycle we need to come closer to balance not at balance and over the long run you just don't want a deficit that's growing your debt faster than your GDP can grow my opinion is that in normal times we should balance our budget and not have a deficit the target of the Peterson Pew Commission was to take the debt to 60 percent of the GDP by in a decade or maybe slightly more and then try to work that debt ratio down to what we might consider to be the post war average 40 plus percent something like that and if you could maintain a debt level like that or lower then you're well suited for emergencies in the future and as a follow up on your question and Jim I'm not I'm not sure that's a great idea that poorer countries ought to be financing us I think I'd like to see us financing ourselves and them to use their money in improving their own many needs in their own countries and of course country and just to mention a couple one of the things that we discussed when we were debating this issue discussing this issue on the Peterson Pew Commission was I think Bill really emphasized this it's almost two steps you want to get it so that your debt's not growing faster than the economy but then you also want to get your debt back down to lower levels closer to the historical average part of the critical reason of that of course why we were able to respond to the past recession was that our debt levels even though our deficits were a little higher than we would have liked our debt levels were low and we were able to borrow an awful lot of money they'll be disagreement about whether it was the right thing or not to do but you certainly want that fiscal flexibility when you're hit with whether it's an economic downturn or any other crisis from the outside and right now we don't have that because of where our debt levels are so it's not just getting so it's not growing faster than the economy again you've got to bring it back down to a level where you had that flexibility one idea that we had that I always liked was that every president who when they put their budget out it's a ten-year budget you don't usually expect that all of those out years will happen because they'll put out another budget but it is a good target to have a president who has to offer a budget that balances over that entire ten-year period because that's reflective of what's a normal business cycle term so it would be you know you could run deficits if the economy were weak but you would expect to have a plan to repay it over time that seems like a reasonable approach there was a question right here from Jim if you wait for the mic so we can hear you on C-SPAN thank you I wanted to ask about Medicare and premium support I know Alice has her own plan first a technical question when the candidates here evaluated for their support of the Ryan plan I wondered I assume it's the first plan not the new one with Wyden which is slightly different and I wanted to ask Alice and the others whether you obviously Alice believes that premium support is the best way to approach reform do you see no well I'll ask you is it the best and do you see any support for anything like what you proposed what Ryan proposes or any other scheme that would help to reduce the cost when I say when you say premium support is the best that doesn't reflect actually what I believe I think we don't know and the proposal that former Senator Pete Domenici and I made is the following that we keep traditional Medicare and we keep the efforts that we now have in the affordable care act to bend the cost curve by trying to figure out what are the most efficient ways to spend money on healthcare and introduce new incentives into Medicare but that we also take advantage of the idea of competition on a federally set up exchange and set up an exchange on which seniors could if they wanted to choose among plans that would cover the same benefits as Medicare and would compete for their business and they could choose the traditional Medicare if they wanted to but the important idea here is that the federal government's contribution would be defined over time and would be capped at a reasonable rate of increase now that's a very long answer but it avoids the simplistic notion that you said premium support is the best thing so whether competition or regulation will be most effective in bending the cost curve and we need to give seniors the chance to choose I'll just jump in and say that one thing I think is really encouraging is that all the candidates have talked about the need for longer term Medicare reforms and embracing the Paul Ryan Medicare premium support plan I believe that's right Jim that is the first version of it but what we've also been seeing is different versions of that coming out so Alice and Pete have the proposal that keeps traditional Medicare there, there's now a bipartisan bill with Senator Wyand and Paul Ryan and a lot of these candidates which is very similar so this discussion is moving forward with premium support part of it one candidate who's actually been more specific on this is Senator Santorum who has talked about bringing in some of these cost controls early on so they're captured as well and he's been more specific on his support for premium support starting to see that discussion both on the campaign trail and outside in the public discourse but the question was whether you see support developing for either of those notions and perhaps some of you see it in the Congress I don't well the candidates if I'm not mistaken in all of the Republican candidates there's something positive about Ryan Wyden which I thought was very interesting whether or not this is again in this black period during an election time that you're going to get Democrats to step up and endorse this is unlikely but I do think it based on the work that Alice and Pete did that these two bipartisan senators have picked up on there is a way to the future on this issue but I think we also have to look at delivery how we deliver health care we have to incentivize changes in that regard in the best place to start with that is with the SRG and start to reward physicians and other providers based on their willingness to be involved in bending the cost curve and getting IT and group practice and a lot of other things involved which is something that many of our providers have been loathed to do health care reform will be the gift that will continue to keep on giving because if there's one thing we know is that we won't get it all done the first round and so we will continue to have to struggle with health care reform in this country for years and years to come it does feel to me though that it's an issue that's percolating and is going to get discussed pretty richly during the campaign which will help us to move forward on needed reforms over time is my prediction that we're going to pay for themselves because it's making something of a resurgence lately we heard a lot about it from the Republicans during the super committee process yesterday Glenn Hubbard on a conference call representing the Romney campaign said that they could offer to cut the tax rates by an additional 20% because you know tax cuts are going to pay for themselves there will be all this extra economic activity and you know the deficit will be fine so I'm wondering can we in the fourth estate summarily miss this idea or how should we think about it please I think there's no evidence that tax cuts pay for themselves when you think about how much faster the economy would have to grow to make up for the revenue of any given tax cut you realize that's unrealistic and I'm surprised that Glenn Hubbard actually said that the what's true is you can show that cutting taxes especially from very high rates can be helpful in increasing economic growth but if that's all you're doing and you're making the deficit larger even though the economy is growing you have to say well what else happens do we make the deficit larger does that put upward pressure on interest rates and does that negate any gain that you might get from marginally increasing the economic growth by cutting taxes and that's basically where the CBO is on scoring they don't they refuse to say to score an individual tax cut as growing the economy without thinking about what else happens they'll score a whole budget proposal and give some credit for tax cuts but some non-credit for raising interest rates or cutting certain kinds of spending to make up the difference I think Alice is dead right there's an awful lot of things going on out there in the economy and it is really hard for somebody to isolate the particular effects of a particular tax cut I think all of us who like low taxes would like to believe in supply side formulations that we will get a great deal of revenue kick out of cutting taxes but I think we have to rely at least I believe I have to rely on the estimates of the joint committee and CBO who are doing the best job they can of information that's available to them so I don't believe tax cuts probably develop as much as some of the sponsors believe they do and that certainly the largest of them are unlikely to pay for themselves in my view it's wishful thinking translated into political policy and you know I look at the fact that the revenues at the moment are 15.4% of GDP and even Mr. Romney says he wants to bring government spending down to 20% of GDP well shouldn't we focus on the 4.6% gap that even he would admit needs to be filled by revenues instead of talking about new tax cuts which in the current context are just ephemeral. Right but I would just clarify that the main reason that revenues are at the level they are right now is still and hangover from the economic recession and that current projections even if you extend the tax cuts or that revenues would grow very significantly as a share of the economy without making any changes so you have to look at the difference between structural deficits and where you are in the cycle I think Lori it's clear that you can say tax cuts don't pay for themselves but we have entered a period where people are looking at more fundamental overhauls of the tax cut and I think this discussion was started in earnest by the proposal made by the two big commissions the bull Simpson commission talked about broadening the tax base dramatically and bringing rates down dramatically and then you can buy back some of those tax expenditures. When you are talking about rate reductions as low as these new reforms are talking about certainly the results will be economic growth and then there are a lot of other variables one of the other variables is how much will that add to the deficit which right now is probably likely to dampen economic growth just like a debt deal over time would help grow the economy as well and then all the other factors that are going on so the problem is not that it's unfair to say there would be some growth from cutting tax rates it's really getting those specific estimates but when you're talking to somebody like a Glenn Hubbard or a serious economist on this my sense is that you can actually take what they're how they're discussing and framing it quite seriously that there is a legitimate claim that it would grow the economy but that's different than that it would pay for himself in terms of how much is captured by the federal government right there. I just had a question on your application for your description of Romney's the impact on the deficit you described it as being deficit neutral I just wanted to clarify that's deficit neutral with respect to the committee's baseline scenario that so actually debt rises under that so I'm not sure that it's exactly a neutral scenario. Well deficit neutral is compared to a baseline and so the better question is exactly which baseline because anybody who is in this stuff or even a little bit exposed to it knows that the world of budgeting baselines is one of the more confusing ones and whenever you're talking about saving something it's always a question of compared to what and the Romney campaign hasn't told us what it's deficit neutral compared to we're assuming it's the same kind of baseline that we use because they know they're assuming that the tax cuts would be extended which is the same starting point that we assume because that seems to be the most likely proposal people are comparing to now and other patches to AMT, SGR but yes the scenarios have the debt rising which is why we tend to look at this metric as debt as a share of GDP and whether it be growing faster or not there and under these proposals it will be growing and then starting to come back down so that's the sort of compared to what question we'll still have to figure out exactly how they're looking at but our assumption is just as you said. Phil. Thank you I'm Phil Joyce from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. I'm much less concerned about the candidates not getting specific about what they will do than I am about them getting very specific about what they will not do in a way that is not ultimately helpful to getting our way out of this, you know, getting out of this problem so I'm interested whether people on the panel are worried about this and sort of how worried about it we should be and whether there's anything that can be done about it. Panelists? I'm very worried about it but particularly on the tax side I think taking a pledge that says I will never raise taxes especially if it means I will never raise revenues as opposed to tax rates I think that's a very dubious and unhelpful kind of pledge to make because as I said earlier I think it is totally unrealistic that we can stabilize the debt over the long term without both increases in revenues and reductions in entitlements. I'd be equally worried by a candidate who said I will never cut the Medicare program or social security benefits but we don't hear that from the Republican side. Same response. It is very dangerous if candidates pledge never to cut entitlements or never to raise taxes. We're not going to get there if they stay in those positions. We hope they're opening bids but it is a dangerous situation and Vic just pointed out the chap who would like to burn all those pledges and I think we ought to build an altar to him in every church in town. It isn't just Grover Norquist who loves all the attention that he gets in every kind of forum like this but it really is across the spectrum and in primaries people are particularly vulnerable to wanting to pledge their fealty to one cause or another. It can be the club for growth. It can be a committee to protect and preserve social security and Medicare. There are all kinds of groups that circulate these things and candidates feel compelled to pledge their loyalty to the cause but when it all comes to a point of needing to break down these barriers and to find bridges it's making it that much more difficult and we all understand it. We're terribly worried about that. I guess the one encouraging thing is I do feel like the public understanding and awareness of this issue has increased and it rings a little bit more hollow than it used to. We're at the committee for a responsible federal budget we're always trying to discuss whether we can start a pledge to not take pledges but we can't climb our way out of that hypocrisy so we don't pursue that when we see the irony in it. You do at least get the sense that we're moving towards a place where candidates, they know they have to govern. Nobody wants to back themselves into a corner as tough as the primary of the election is for them and so you can see them if you listen to them and when they're trying to kind of keep a little bit of space I think that the situation has changed where people are trying not to back themselves into a corner where they won't be able to govern because whoever takes office is going to have to at least get a start if not completely really turn the situation around and it's all the harder if they have made promises of what they won't do to get us there. We have time for one final question. Yes, right here. I'm Bill Crosby. I spent 27 years on the House Rules Committee and among other things that's where a lot of the waivers of the budget act took place and so I'd like to follow up on the question of budget process and budget enforcement mechanisms. Do any of you all have specific suggestions for budget enforcement mechanisms that might work better than some of the things we have tried to this point? I think we can devise better mechanisms that spotlight the targets and perhaps shine more light on the Congress when it attempts to renege on its promises but we know the first thing we're told when we go to Congress is that no Congress can bind the future Congress and if future Congresses decide that previous promises are no good they can certainly well shine them and do with some regularity but if they are made prominent if the targets are well understood by the people I think it will become more and more difficult to Welsh. Also you have to make the enforcement such that it isn't too stern if you make the penalty too tough for not meeting the target then Congress can be expected to try to avoid it and you also have to anticipate that there will be times when it's necessary to avoid it a war for instance but I think we can make them better but there's no way to make them perfect I would just say at this point I'm more concerned about the fact that we have no budget process we don't have an appropriations process that works we simply have stopped doing even the reconciliation bills that used to be done periodically because somebody wanted to pass a tax cut with 51% I mean we have let the whole process deteriorate to a point where the highly partisan and very toxic environment on the hill has made it impossible to function even in the most basic ways let alone impose rules and regulations that would make it more difficult to avoid taking a gimmick approach or waving something that we all ought to adhere to so I think it's even more basic than your question and I hope we can get in a new environment in the next congress where we can at least let the process work as it was supposed to I would take issue with your characterization of the process rules of the past as totally not working the issue I think is that they did work the budget enforcement act had quite good rules that we worked give or take a few waivers toward the end of the period and I expect that the caps on discretionary spending will work because most of the congress wants them to our problem is that although the old PAYGO rules worked pretty well the situation now is that the entitlement programs are spending up even if you do nothing so you really need a new set of rules that says we're not going to do anything that increases the debt faster than a particular limit and we just need to evolve what those rules are and then as my colleagues said a consensus that we want to enforce them because nothing is going to happen unless we have that consensus that we're going to have three T's which were targets, triggers and transparency and the thinking was that when we start this process right now we don't even lay out where the budget is trying to go the budget process doesn't even start with an ultimate objective and so that's where we came up with this objective is to stabilize the debt 60% of GDP bring it back down afterwards but set a benchmark or metric for what you're seeing that beginning in earnest so we have the sequester right now it may or may not prove to be effective one of our bigger concerns of course is that people are trying to get rid of the sequester which would be very risky and quite possibly lead to another downgrade but the real idea here is you have that sequester or that trigger nobody should want it to hit it's a terrible way to do policy and that helps to incentivize putting in place smarter policies to get to your targets or where you need to go and I do think that as the fiscal situation becomes more dire and people are less willing to talk about policies that would make it worse those kinds of triggers have more of an effect and finally transparency one thing that we've seen when you look at other countries one of the things that helps keep a country and their budget on track is if the public knows what you're trying to do and rallies around it and holds politicians accountable if they fail to do it that's one of the reasons that actually trying to balance your budget is so desirable because it's easy for people to understand so when we talk about stabilizing the debt it's a little more challenging two years ago I believe we had a party where we put stabilize the debt on a bunch of cookies to try to make it a bumper sticker I haven't seen those bumper stickers it's not as catchy as one might like but what you need is the public to know what you're trying to do and help hold politicians accountable so those are kinds of the pieces we've looked at but I really think having these triggers these default policies if you don't make these changes politicians they're going to happen automatically and that's not the best way to govern and it's really turning over your power to automatic trigger so hopefully that can help pressure politicians to come together and make those right choices so with that I would like to thank our wonderful panelist Vic Fazio, Bill Frenzel and Alice Rivlin thank you so much anyone who'd like to download the report it is now available on CRFB.org and we please stay tuned we will have future editions of US budget watch thank you