More Revenue, Please

Down the hall my colleagues at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget sponsored a video contest for people across the country to tell the budget experts in Washington, DC their ideas on ways to fix the budget.

The winners were announced yesterday during their “The Human Side of the Fiscal Crisis” event, which featured a very elevated and constructive discussion. I listened to most of the event while at my desk (which you can too). For me, the presentations collectively reinforced the importance of shifting the current focus away from spending cuts toward identifying ways to increase revenue. It seems clear that will need a bigger pie in order to meet our responsibilities to each other as a society. This includes being able to provide a reliable safety net to assist those who need help but it’s also a precondition for the types of investments in education, infrastructure, and research that will determine our future prosperity.

Now, I’m a firm believer in responsibility. If we can find waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending, let’s start by cutting that out of the budget. I’d like us to get a handle on long-term health care spending and bend the cost curve. I think the Pentagon’s budget should assessed and probably reduced. But I also believe there is an imperative to increase the revenue side of the ledger. Almost all of the fiscal commission plans that approach this topic credibly recognize that some new source of funding will be part of the solution. I welcome the discussion as to whether this should be a value-added tax, a financial transaction tax, a carbon tax, or the simple gas tax. We should be focusing on these options and ways to ensure they can be implemented progressively so the burden is fairly distributed. 

Here’s one of the runner ups, Anna Flaherty, that I missed out on the cash prize but I thought should have won. She makes some excellent points in a compelling presentational style. I’ve always been partial to the singer-songwriters who put themselves out there with just their guitar. But this is the first song I’ve ever heard featuring the gas tax. Well done, Anna. I’m not sure Dylan could have done much better.