"In classical tragedy, this is known as the denouement. In Washington, it could be just farce."
David Meyer Wessel is an American journalist and writer. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. He is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 30 years. Wessel appears frequently on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
"“From the mid-1930s to the 1970s, the government made a set of commitments that led to expectations on the part of the American people about what their government owes them,” says Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “And they are totally unprepared to go back to a different world.”"
"Nearly all the growth in the federal budget over the next ten years [2013-2022] is going to come from spending on healthcare and interest payments unless something changes. “You can’t fix this without doing health care,” says Paul Ryan. “I mean, health care is the driver of our debt.” And, as he and others routinely observe, even though the United States spends far more per person on health care than any other country, it isn’t close to having the world’s healthiest population."
"In all, $1 of every $5 the federal government spent in 2011 went to defense, and about 20 cents of that $1 was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
"The overarching lesson: Bringing the deficit down to sustainable levels takes big changes. Little ones won’t do it."
"In a city riddled with dysfunctional institutions, the CBO has become one of the few organs of Congress that actually work. It is the arbiter of facts, a call-it-as-we-see-it outfit that is viewed as largely immune to political pressure."
"The share of income most American families pay in federal taxes has been falling for more than thirty years. Today, Americans pay less of their income in taxes than citizens of nearly every other developed country."