Facing Our Fiscal Challenges

Greenstein Statement: How Does the Obama Budget Do In Meeting Deficit Reduction Goals?

"The President’s budget would, if enacted, make significant progress in reducing deficits, although policymakers would have to take further steps, especially for future decades. Under its economic assumptions, it would achieve what most budget analysts, and all recent bipartisan commissions or panels, have identified as the crucial fiscal goal for the decade ahead — stabilizing the debt so that it no longer rises faster than the economy. To meet that goal, deficits must shrink to a bit less than 3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the President’s budget would stabilize deficits at 2.8% of GDP from 2019 through 2022. The budget also would stop the debt from rising as a share of the economy in 2014 and reduce it slightly as a share of GDP over the following eight years." Read more

Understanding the Safety Net

Contrary to "Entitlement Society" Rhetoric, Over 90% of Benefits Go to Elderly, Disabled, or Working Households

"Some conservative critics of federal social programs, including leading presidential candidates, are sounding an alarm that the United States is rapidly becoming an ‘entitlement society’ in which social programs are undermining the work ethic and creating a large class of Americans who prefer to depend on government benefits rather than work.  A new CBPP analysis of budget and Census data, however, shows that more than 90 percent of the benefit dollars that entitlement and other mandatory programs  spend go to assist people who are elderly, seriously disabled, or members of working households — not to able-bodied, working-age Americans who choose not to work.  This figure has changed little in the past few years."  Read more

More: Federal Budget Analyses