Scan the q. R. Code to listen. Cspan is your unfiltered view of government. Were funded by these Television Companies and more, including comcast. You think this is just a Community Center . No, its way more than that. Comcast is partnering with thousands of Community Centers with lists so lowncome students can have everything ey need. And comcast supports cspan, giving you a front row seat to democracy. Host were back this morning with mark goldwine, senior policy director for the committee for a responsible federal budget here to talk about u. S. Deficit and federal spending. Mark, lets begin with defining deficit versus debt. Do that and then tell us the difference. Guest thanks so much for having me this morning. The deficit is how much we borrow each were and the debt is how much we owe. Its the sum of all of our past deficits. If you think of a credit card, the deficit is how much youve added to the credit card bill in 2023. The debt is how much you owe total. Host where are we at right now in 2023 with our deficit . Guest there are different ways to measure it but you talk about growth federal debt, 23 trillion. At how the public is a share of the economy. We are close to 100 . It is as large as a full years worth of output. Host why are we in this position . Guest there is no one thing, but the kobe crisis in the Great Recession before that included a lot of one time borrowing that got us far from our historical average of 50 to 100 . Underlying that, we keep passing new tax cuts and new spending increases that widen our structural deficits and the agent of the population and Rising Health care costs put pressure on some of our oldest programs, Social Security and medicare to continue growing in cost. Host are we paying our credit card . Guest we are paying it with credit cards. We are borrowing a lot and we will roll over debt from previous years. Host according to the new report, the deficit is rising faster than projected. Why . Guest last years deficit was 1 trillion, this year 2 trillion. Effectively, the deficit has doubled. Part of the reason is it turns out 2022 was a high water point. We had a good year in terms of tax question tax collection from capital gain. Now, things are normal. Adding to the cost of Social Security and medicare went up sharply because of inflation and our interest costs are as high as theyve ever been since the 90s, with the average Interest Rate on new debt, even 5. 5 in some cases. Host who is to blame . Guest host we all are. The voters need to take was possibility because we love low taxes, Government Services and benefits. Politicians keep making promises they cant afford. They tell us dont worry about the borrowing because it will pay for itself or the Spending Program is so important. Many of the economists are to blame. When Interest Rates were low, they said borrowing is cheap, lets do it. It did not occur to them Interest Rates will rise and we are going to roll over the cheap debt into expensive debt. Host this chart from your report shows the divergence between spending and revenue over the years. What can you tell us . What has been happening . Guest two things. We keep cutting taxes so revenue has a built in growth and as incomes grow up, revenue should be growing. That is not happen if we keep cutting taxes. The other is increased spending. New government programs, onetime relief so that made sense and some of it did not. For example, covid. And we have allowed our largest programs including Social Security, medicare and medicaid to grow completely unfettered. We have known these are on a nonsustainable track. If you are on Social Security now, it will not be able to pay that in 10 years because it will be insolvent. Yet we have done nothing to raise more revenue to finance it. Host why not . Guest because it is hard. It is fun to tell people i gave you a tax cut and protected your sources there Social Security benefits. It is hard to say in the interest of the greater good, we will have to raise the retirement age by one month every two years. You will have to pay more taxes on your income. We can do it especially if republicans and democrats got together. But it is politically tough because nobody wants to pay more taxes or lower benefits host . [indiscernible] dont host one former President Trump was in control, there were tax cuts. There was a piece about how much of those tax cuts will stay in place because President Biden has said no one made making lesson 40,000 should see a tax increase. Their reporting said much of trumps tax cut package stays in place. Guest it is possible. Republicans cut taxes by about 2 trillion over 10 years in the Trump Administration and join hands with democrats to increase spending and cut taxes by a combined almost 3 trillion more. Many of those taxes expire at the end of 2025. Though there has been talk of paying for suspensions, we dont know how they are going to do it. It is a big risk that the parties have joined together not with hard choices but by extending and expanding the tax cuts. Host we are eight working days away from a possible shutdown. Conservative republicans are saying we need to address spending now. They want to spend 150 billion dollars less than what the president and Speaker Mccarthy agreed to in may. Guest that may agreement, the fiscal responsibly act is a good start. Democrats and republicans came together on a plan to freeze spending levels for per year and have it grow slowly next year. It would not solve our debt would save one to 2 trillion over a decade. We ought to go forward with this and then work on how to build on it. Now, the house wants to spend below the deal. The senate wants to spend above the deal. They are taking all of this and declaring it an emergency. It was ordinary spending. But nobody wants to abide by it. Lets pass this spending act and then go back for more. We will have to cut spending a lot to get the debt under control. Host let me ask our viewers to join us. Democrats 202 7488000. Republicans 202 7488001. Independent 202 7488002. And text us at 202 7488003. Include your name, city and state. If we were to continue the trend we have been seeing over the next decade, where would that put us at . Guest am ug;u an ugly place. If we continue on our current trajectory, within 10 years we are going to be at 115 130 within 30 years. It will be several between 180 and 300 of gdp. There is no historical example and there are not any international cases. The closest is japan. That is a recipe for slow and stagnant growth, rising interest costs, and talk to this. Host what would it take and how long to get out of the crisis . Guest we should start now. If we put 6 trillion in the Debt Reduction over the next decade, it would pull it to the lower sides of the economy. That would be important. It would mean we have cut tax rates or raise revenue. We have to restrict the growth of the appropriation. We have to get serious about Health Care Costs under control and Social Security. If we wait till the right moment, it will cause because that could put us in a recession and are not going to feel good for the folks relying on various programs. Host davey in arkansas, democrat. Guests caller this morning we gave around 6 billion and the money had gained through oil sales. The accounts were on the Trump Administration. Does this guest know anything about it . Host i dont think so. That is pretty specific. But to his point about spending money, and to foreign countries, right now, the continuing resolution. Should it include an additional 20 billion for ukraine . On top of the billions the government has been given to the country so far in the fight against russia. Guest i think what theyre asking about, we owe iran for money money from when we were not in conflict. So the request was to release those funds. Foreign aid is about 1 of the budget and we should have debate over whether it is worth it. We should scrutinize every dollar and spend it efficiently. But we are not going to fix it by cutting foreign aid, getting billion a supported taxes. Changes to the tax code, reforms to health care. We cant get it from these tiny pots of money alone. Have the Committee Center for the budget learned and what does your group recommend . You can go to Social Security reformer. Org. It allows anyone to design their own program. Highschoolers of houston and members of congress have used it for legislation. There are only a few levels, your retirement age, your tax rate, much income is subject to that, the structure of the benefits of that, and the costofliving adjustment. You can tinker with all of them. You can personalize it. We do need more revenue into the program, but we also need to adjust the benefit formula and age and we can do all of this in a way that encourages economic growth. We put out a study last week that said if you do thoughtful security reform, you can boost income by 10,000 per person 30 years from now. So there is a tremendous upside. Host what about health care . You mentioned that. What do you propose to do . Guest the United States spends about 50 percent on health care, twice the average. There is waste, some is overpayment, some is but will right now the Medicaid Program pays more if you see a doctor in a hospital which is the same doctor in a doctor setting. We can equalize that. There is an alternative to medicare called medicare advantage. It is called it costs the federal government more money because of the way the they recorded their costs. Just getting rid of some of the fraud and misreporting could save hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade. Host john. Independent. Thank you. I dont have an issue with the Government Shutdown over this spending. The ahead have one they have two jobs that would help me. Securing the border and true church them without with our strong military. Our taxes in con so i will otieno how your guest response to that. Host ok. Guests the insomnia into most of with the special Security Program does an initial not resolve. Wherever when you have a permanent shutdown. It might be for a week or a month and then will go back and we have federal employees for not working over that time. We will have backlogs and waste with no actual upside unless it leads to serious policy change. Host a disabled. And you say it wont. Guest it could. The only thing that that could come out of the shut down is it leads to an unrelated policy change, and leverage point to lead to an improvement in policy. It does not make the government more efficient, but less. Host we talked with her audience earlier about Discretionary Spending versus mandatory. Those two letters and what this debate is on capitol hill about setting the government down from the toppling figure. Does that impact mandatory spending, Social Security and medicare checkout medicare . Guest people will still get their Social Security and medicare. But people newly applying mega trouble. We do see a discretionary budget from the initiation of these programs. Host eric in duluth, minnesota. Democrat. Caller i would like to give a statement as to whether it is the overspending or the cutting of taxes, which is to blame . Since the era of the in rate the pregnant magician, when the first tax cuts occurred, the number of billionaires in the u. S. Has increased. Number 13 at the start of the Reagan Administration and their and our thousand. They did quite well during the period the National Debt has accrued. Guest asking me if tax cuts or spending is to blame is like which side of the scissors into the cutting. They both are. Need to stop cutting taxes over and over and focus on egregious tax breaks that as you say benefit billionaires. We also keep spending more and we have done almost nothing to get under control our two largest Spending Programs, Social Security and medicare. Host in georgetown, south carolina, independent. Caller i wanted to talk about the National Debt and the situation of spending cuts. I think it is really messed up to talk about cutting medicare spending and Social Security spending. Because the United States spends over 700 billion a year just in military spending. Even with the nuclear stuff and everything, it ends up being about 1 trillion a year in federal spending just in military defense. We could be cutting that spending by a lot in order to help fund these programs that help workingclass people. Host has your group looked into Pentagon Spending . Guest for sure. Thank you. There is incredible waste in the Defense Department and lots of room to cut and bring that under control. I want to point out that when it comes to medicare, there is so much we can do to save people money that is not actually cutting benefits. It is improving the value of the program. That is what we did and the Inflation Reduction Act will be put in place negotiations for drug prices and caps so they cant raise it. The ideas that president obama talked about before trump. When it comes to medicare, there is so much room to lower costs and ways to improve benefits. Social security is 10 years from insolvency. If you dont touch it, the law calls for about a 70,000 cut from retiring over 10 years. We have to get it under control for its own case. You have to do that with new revenue. And then we need to look at defense spending. Social security, medicare and defense is looking at all three and knotting the budget seriously. Guests two they have to do any sort of accounting for congress . Guest congress does this in two parts. They authorize the money and then they appropriate it to the appropriations process. With this fund successfully it no that has not happened yet. We should be cutting west weapon systems because the commercial district. Not because theyre the best ways you tied to bureaucracy ill with domain sense. Theres sergeant into natural only get. Yes what habits in the body an audience just for guests understands the mission of but it should be brought so that a proper audit can be done. Host hello. I am wondering if use aware of this magic number of 37,000, and i want boesch one, the fatherinlaw died in a nursing home and the family received a bill for 37,000. The man only owned 5,000 worth of property. The other is my sister has asbestos and a tumor in her lung. Her first award came in this month and medicare sent took out 900 of the 1100 that she was awarded by the Bankruptcy Court that handles these cases. They said they will continue taking one third of whatever she gets until she has repaid 37,000. It seems to be a magic number and nobody knows where it comes from. It is never heard of it. Guest it is not something ive heard of either party to look into it. The first might be medicaid, medicare. It doesnt like a lot of money but im not sure what the magic of 37 thousand dollars is. Host when was the last time the u. S. Was not in a deficit . Guest in 2001 we had a balanced budget. We started the hard work of bipartisan of balancing the budget through some reductions but especially in a 90 the commission of their efforts and accommodate bonus abounds we have cut taxes and the wars in iraq and afghanistan, the Global Financial crisis and then we increased spending and cut taxes. And then we had a coma recession covid recession and know we are adding to the deficit. The balance seems so far out of reach even though it was only 20 years ago. Host what would it take to get back to a surplus . Guest cutting spending by about a quarter and increasing revenue by about a third. This is not realistic in the broader sense. It goes from unrealistic to impossible if you take things like Social Security and veterans often table. Or state we are only going to raise taxes on people making 40,000. We are not going to get to balanced any time soon and that is ok. We dont need a balanced budget. What we need is a budget where deficits are small enough that the economy can grow faster than the debt. So the debt to gdp at about 100 right now is going down. There is no magic number. The direction is what matters. You cannot have a debt that is growing faster than the gdp indefinitely. The more we produce it, the better it is for economic growth. But step one should be lets hold 100 of gdp. Host can it go higher . Guest i would prefer it not. Dont know the breaking points. We know the higher the the debt is, the more interest, lets follow what we need to for emergencies at recession. We put out a study that it is different from a trajectory and it will flow. The eye kinky yeah. So that might be hard financially craters. That would be devastating. Think of all of the financial crises with note u. S. Government to bail out companies and citizens in need. There is no number when that happens and i hope it never does. But at the risk it becomes likely as your death client. Guests ceo who is granted money in excess of the president s salary should not have any more than the president s salary deductible from corporate taxes. That is all i had to say. Guest we do have a policy like that in the tax code that limits the deductibility of executive compensation. I believe it is over 5 million for the ceo and 2 million for other officers. You could lower it to form 2000 but we have the structure of that already in the tax code. Host jennifer in ohio, indepen