year before the 2008 election that would bring Leon Panetta back to Washington—and before the Great Recession had hit—he and a few other veterans of the 1990s deficit wars were called by Kent Conrad to appear before the Senate Budget Committee. Panetta had been out of government for years, building a public policy institute in Monterey. He came to Washington periodically to scold his successors in his role as cochairman of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a hardy antideficit lobby that brings together aging budget experts from both parties to wring their hands and offer advice, welcomed or not.
In congressional testimony, Panetta recalled the surpluses that the government had been running when he left Washington. He remembered hoping that his successors “would never again permit runaway deficits to undermine [the nation’s] economic strength.” But, he said sternly, “events, partisanship, and a failure of leadership on all sides have conspired to produce the kind of irresponsible fiscal behavior that again threatens our future.”
The combination of “exploding” benefit programs, the aging of the population, the “rapid rise” in health care costs, and growing interest payments “places us on an unsustainable path to fiscal chaos.
“What is even more discouraging,” he said, with a sigh, “is that it ignores virtually everything we have learned the hard way in the past.”
CHAPTER 3
WHERE THE MONEY GOES
T he federal budget is as vast as the government itself: the instructions the White House sends agencies for making and keeping track of annual budget requests run 972 pages. The
instructions.
The four-volume budget that Obama sent to Congress in February 2012 came to 2,238 pages. Then each agency produced thousands of pages of more detail.The Department of Homeland Security’s supplement topped out at 3,134 pages, one page for every $12.6 million it was seeking to spend.
To make sense of all this, groups that promote fiscal rectitude have boiled the budget down to (relatively) simple online games: cut spending here, raise taxes there, and see if you can do better at bringing the deficit under control than Congress and the president. There’s
Stabilize the Debt
by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and
Federal Budget Challenge
by the Concord Coalition. The most elaborate is
Budget Hero,
built by educational gamers for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a government-backed Washingtonthink tank, and American Public Media, a public radio network. This is no
Call of Duty
or
Portal 2
. There’s no adrenaline rush from deciding whose taxes to raise or how much to cut the defense budget. But since it was launched on the Web in 2008,
Budget Hero
has been played 1.4 million times. The game plucks options from the thick catalog of ways to reduce the deficit published annually by the Congressional Budget Office and puts them into a Pokémon-style video game. Just as in real life, there is no single goal. Players identify up to three objectives, such as achieving greater energy independence or improving the competitiveness of the U.S. economy, and try to use the spending and tax levers to reach them. A running tally shows the consequences of their choices on deficits and the size of government. The overarching lesson: Bringing the deficit down to sustainable levels takes big changes. Little ones won’t do it.
Despite the video games and think tank websites and newspaper pie charts and televised presidential debates, the public remains strikingly misinformed about the budget.The typical respondent to a CNN poll said food stamps accounted for 10 percent of federal spending; it’s closer to 2 percent. Maybe being off by a factor of five is understandable given the enormity and complexity of the budget. But it’s harder to make sense ofa 2008 Cornell University poll in which 44 percent of those who receive Social Security checks and 40 percent of those covered by
In congressional testimony, Panetta recalled the surpluses that the government had been running when he left Washington. He remembered hoping that his successors “would never again permit runaway deficits to undermine [the nation’s] economic strength.” But, he said sternly, “events, partisanship, and a failure of leadership on all sides have conspired to produce the kind of irresponsible fiscal behavior that again threatens our future.”
The combination of “exploding” benefit programs, the aging of the population, the “rapid rise” in health care costs, and growing interest payments “places us on an unsustainable path to fiscal chaos.
“What is even more discouraging,” he said, with a sigh, “is that it ignores virtually everything we have learned the hard way in the past.”
CHAPTER 3
WHERE THE MONEY GOES
T he federal budget is as vast as the government itself: the instructions the White House sends agencies for making and keeping track of annual budget requests run 972 pages. The
instructions.
The four-volume budget that Obama sent to Congress in February 2012 came to 2,238 pages. Then each agency produced thousands of pages of more detail.The Department of Homeland Security’s supplement topped out at 3,134 pages, one page for every $12.6 million it was seeking to spend.
To make sense of all this, groups that promote fiscal rectitude have boiled the budget down to (relatively) simple online games: cut spending here, raise taxes there, and see if you can do better at bringing the deficit under control than Congress and the president. There’s
Stabilize the Debt
by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and
Federal Budget Challenge
by the Concord Coalition. The most elaborate is
Budget Hero,
built by educational gamers for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a government-backed Washingtonthink tank, and American Public Media, a public radio network. This is no
Call of Duty
or
Portal 2
. There’s no adrenaline rush from deciding whose taxes to raise or how much to cut the defense budget. But since it was launched on the Web in 2008,
Budget Hero
has been played 1.4 million times. The game plucks options from the thick catalog of ways to reduce the deficit published annually by the Congressional Budget Office and puts them into a Pokémon-style video game. Just as in real life, there is no single goal. Players identify up to three objectives, such as achieving greater energy independence or improving the competitiveness of the U.S. economy, and try to use the spending and tax levers to reach them. A running tally shows the consequences of their choices on deficits and the size of government. The overarching lesson: Bringing the deficit down to sustainable levels takes big changes. Little ones won’t do it.
Despite the video games and think tank websites and newspaper pie charts and televised presidential debates, the public remains strikingly misinformed about the budget.The typical respondent to a CNN poll said food stamps accounted for 10 percent of federal spending; it’s closer to 2 percent. Maybe being off by a factor of five is understandable given the enormity and complexity of the budget. But it’s harder to make sense ofa 2008 Cornell University poll in which 44 percent of those who receive Social Security checks and 40 percent of those covered by
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