As Congress continues the struggle to tame federal deficit spending, some argue that tax hikes and defense cuts are necessary and inevitable. For example, a recent brief from the Concord Coalition on the prospects for the House Majority’s coming budget resolution for fiscal year 2012 makes the case that conservatives will be hard pressed to reduce the deficit without raising taxes or cutting national defense. The Concord Coalition looks at various deficit-cutting strategies that conservatives in the House might embrace and compares the results to those of the President’s own …
The 2010 fiscal year just ended, but America’s fiscal crisis has just begun. In 2010, the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) preliminary estimates show that the federal government spent $3.45 trillion, amassing a deficit of $1.3 trillion. Spending on entitlement programs, which include Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, comprised 41 percent of the budget. And this is just the beginning. By 2050, entitlement programs will consume the entire federal budget. To keep up with this level of spending, the CBO predicts that tax rates would have to grow to 19 percent …
Sometime next month the Senate will be forced to raise the federal debt limit beyond a record $12.1 trillion. While the current recession has exacerbated the problem, our rising national deficits are actually a structural problem a long time in the making. In the coming decades, the cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits will leap from 8.4% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 18.6% of GDP—an increase of 10.2% of GDP. To educate Americans about our nation’s large and growing fiscal imbalance The Heritage Foundation has, since 2005, …
