Billion Dollar Chump Change

Prologue

During the summer of 2011, Congress spent a considerable amount of time, energy and resources talking-at the American public about the need to reduce the federal deficit, cut wasteful spending and potentially balance the budget.

This debacle over the increase in the federal debt ceiling was the culmination of a lot of talk that has not resulted in a lot of action. My goal for this book is to propose policy changes that can bring in $500 million here, save $2 billion there, and so on. The aggregate impact of just these recommendations could be tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars toward deficit reduction.

The “Budget Control Act of 2011”, which was passed to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis of the summer of 2011, established a new committee in Congress known as the “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction”. The goal of the Joint Committee is to “reduce the deficit by at least $1,500,000,000,000 over the period of fiscal years 2012 to 2021”. If we distill the mission of the Committee into realistic terms, the goal is to create an average savings of $150 billion a year for each of the next ten years.

Perhaps this “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction” should not rely solely on traditional sources of input but also look at citizen recommendations. Certainly, the Committee has nothing to lose by receiving citizen input.