In the coming months, policymakers will be making important decisions about how to reduce the federal budget deficit. These decisions pose significant political and economic challenges, but also create a rare window of opportunity for policymakers to decide what kinds of programs and investments our country values and what sort of society we will create for future generations.
To this end, The Hamilton Project asked leading experts from a variety of backgrounds — the policy world, academia, and the private sector, and from both sides of the political aisle — to develop policy proposals that could form a partial menu of options to achieve responsible deficit reduction.
Photo Gallery: 15 Ways to Save the Federal Budget
The mandate given to the authors was to describe pragmatic, evidenced-based proposals that would both reduce the deficit and also bring broader economic benefits. The resulting 15 proposals are included in The Hamilton Project’s 15 Ways to Rethink the Federal Budget.
While not intended to cover every budget category, these papers take on a wide-ranging set of topics, including immigration, transportation, health care, defense spending, and tax expenditures, and include options to reduce mandatory and discretionary expenditures, raise revenues, and improve government efficiency.
(This article originally appeared on the Brookings Institution website and is used by permission.)
