Archive.fm

WKXL - New Hampshire Talk Radio

Facing the Future | Debt Solutions are Possible

This week on Facing the Future we’ll talk with Jeff Holland of the Peterson Foundation about a series of papers released last week called Solutions Initiative 2024. It features seven plans from prominent think tanks, including one from our second guest, Andrew Lautz of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Duration:
44m
Broadcast on:
01 Aug 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
"Well, the first thing I think he would do would be to stand up and tell the truth. I mean, he had a great expression that was "just tell the truth and watch him scatter." "Well, the further way the problem is, the easier it is to postpone the action on it. And that's essentially what we're doing." "Be real. Because people in New Hampshire are really cool." "I'd say get in the game. This is a problem facing your generation. You have to have a voice in the decision." Welcome to Facing the Future, brought to you by the Concord Coalition on WKXL, New Hampshire's Talk Radio Station. I'm your host, Bob Bixby. Each week we take a nonpartisan dive into topics related to the federal budget, the economy, and how it all affects our nation's future. This week we'll talk with Jeff Holland, Vice President for Research at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, about a series of papers released last week by the foundation called Solutions Initiative 2024, Charting a Brighter Future. The series of papers features seven plans, from seven different prominent think tanks of diverse perspectives, that would each reduce and stabilize the long-term trajectory of the debt relative to current law. And then later in the show, we'll talk with Andrew Lutz, Associate Director for Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He's a co-author of one of these solutions, papers. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joins the conversation. So our first guest, Jeff Holland, spent 26 years at the Congressional Budget Office, where he was Chief of the Projections Unit. That was all before joining the Peterson Foundation in 2017. At CBO, Holland oversaw the production of data and compilation of the CBO budget and economic outlook. And so he's got a lot of experience with budget plans and budget forecast. So Jeff and Steve, welcome to Facing the Future. Thanks, Bob. Thanks Steve. Great to be here. Okay. So Jeff, I guess if congressional leaders ever want to turn to the controlling the debt, which I think just hit 35 trillion, they can certainly draw some inspiration and get some ideas from this series of plans. So could you tell us, what are the Peterson Foundation, why did you begin this initiative and what were you hoping to achieve by it? Yeah, thanks, Bob. Yeah, so we have a few objectives here and let me just say that we've done this before. The most recent one was in 2019 and we had done it a couple of times before that. But it's been five years and things have changed. One thing that's changed is that the fiscal situation's gotten a lot worse. The debt to GDP ratio is 20% points higher now than it was when we did this in 2019. So we're at about 100% of the debt is held by the public is around 100% of GDP. And soon to cross its all time high, probably within the next three years or so, and on the trajectory to keep rising after that, we're concerned about where we stand right now and the lack of legislative progress over those past few years. So essentially we're looking at deficits as far as we can see. Secondly, there's a number of fiscal deadlines coming up next year. At the beginning of January, the debt ceiling will be reinstated. So that will need to be addressed. The tax cuts and jobs act has a number of provisions mostly related to individual income taxations that will expire at the end of next year, at the end of December, looking out a little further, the depletion dates for Social Security and Medicare are looming towards the end of the next decade. So there are just a number of fiscal deadlines that we think need to be addressed and all of the solutions participants did that. And then of course third, we're in the middle of a campaign season and the leaders that were elected this fall are going to have to deal with these sorts of situations. So even though it might not be gave that much attention, we'd like to think of this as a fiscal election. And the Solutions Initiative provides a playbook for legislators to use to address these serious issues when they come into office. I should note, I mentioned that there were seven groups that participated. And so I'm going to name them to give them their due, but there was the American Action Forum, which is more of a center-right organization. The American Enterprise Institute, I think, is also considered on the right, the Bipartisan Policy Center, considered in the middle, the Center for American Progress, more to the liberal side, and the Economic Policy Institute, more to the liberal side, the Manhattan Institute, more to the conservative side, and the Progressive Policy Institute, more to the liberal side. Now, there are different shades of gray within all that, but you got a wide perspective of left and right from the groups that participated. Yeah, that's right. So the idea was essentially to provide some sort of balance. So as you know, we had sort of three left-leaning groups, three right-leaning groups, Bipartisan Policy Center and the center, and so that generated a lot of different approaches. But the main point is that all seven of them agreed that it was necessary to reduce the trajectory of the debt. Of course, they did it in different ways, but it's important that they all felt was important. We did not give them a target. We basically said, "What would you do to address the trajectory?" And they all reduced it substantially by a third, if not more. It also points out that there are just a lot of potential solutions. So we got seven comprehensive plans where there were a number of areas of agreement, but they came up with over 200 different policy options, and they did it on both sides of the budget. So the policy options addressed both spending and revenues, and that's where it demonstrates the point that we can't really address the fiscal issues that we face on just one side of the budget. And Washington Post had an interesting headline when they picked up this story, and they basically said, "It's necessary to tame the national debt, and surprisingly doable." And I think that's a real takeaway from this, that there are options available. There are ways to do it if we can generate the political momentum to do so. Yeah, that was a great editorial in the Washington Post. Congratulations. Well, thank you. We were very happy about that. Yeah, I can imagine. Just before I turn to Steve here, you mentioned people, different groups did in different ways. The Economic Policy Institute's plan got spending up to like 35% of GDP and revenue up to about 35% of GDP, a little bit below that, but they were able to reduce the debt to GDP ratio down to 79% of GDP within 30 years, which is a lot slower than it is now. And yet on the other side of the coin, you had the American Enterprise Institute had both spending and revenues at about 19% of GDP, considerably different than the EPI's. But they got their debt to GDP ratio down to about 85% of GDP. So just sort of validation of what you're saying is that there are many different paths to the same direction. So whatever side of the spectrum you're on, you can choose a fiscally responsible path to get there. Yeah. I mean, definitely different philosophies about how to do this and different some variations on themes. Although, as I said, there were a lot of commonalities and we can get into those. But they all reduce the debt to GDP ratio relative to the baseline. They do in ways that are consistent with the philosophies of their organizations. It gave everyone a chance to sort of, despite what they thought, were approaches that sort of met their own criteria. Well, Steve and I were there for the presentations that you were moderating. So I want to turn out as Steve for a question. Yeah. Let me follow up on the Washington Post editorial. Yeah. I was also pleased that the post sort of came out and said, "Yeah, you know, everybody agrees that we have a problem," and there is a pathway of solving or addressing the problem. But just out of curiosity, I went through some of the reader comments section at the end of the editorial, and it sadly appeared that most of the readers were sort of divided into two groups. You had those that wanted to tax the rich and those that wanted to cut spending. And it's like those two positions sort of seemed to reflect where, unfortunately, where the parties are right now, certainly at the primary voter level where everybody wants to solve the problem on the revenue side or the spending side, but they don't want to compromise and do a little of both. And given the political divide, how do we go about getting to a political compromise? I mean, you've got people who want to put at the political level seem to only want to do one thing or the other. Well, first of all, Steve, you know you should never read the comments on the internet. But I actually did the same early on, and one thing I did notice about the comments is that the Washington Post editorial is relatively short, so it didn't really cover the full comprehensive nature of all the plans. They highlighted a few things, and a lot of the commenters sort of focused just on the items at the post-highlight. But the plans are so much more comprehensive than what the post could cover in editorial. But you raise, of course, a valid point, it's much easier for sort of thoughtful people from think tanks to try and figure out what they would do, and then we could talk about those areas of agreement. But it's a lot different in the political sphere. But I think what gives us some optimism here is that there were a number of areas of compromise. For example, we are facing these portions of the individual income tax provisions that were enacted in 2017. Someone essentially agreed that if you were to extend any set of those, that needed to be offset. So even as you mentioned, the American Enterprise Institute, who had sort of the lowest revenues to GDP ratio going forward, at least maintained the baseline amount of revenues that CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, had projected. Now the CBO assumes that those provisions expire schedule. That's where current losses should happen. So AEI has offsets in their plan to sort of keep to that baseline level. Not necessarily one to one, but theoretically, that's what they're going for. There is that kind of general agreement, at least. We're going to pick up on that on the other side of the break. You're listening to Face in the Future, I'm your host Bob Bixby. Steve Robinson and I are talking with Jeff Holland of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation about the Foundations Solutions Initiative, we'll be right back after these short messages. Welcome back to Face in the Future, I'm your host Bob Bixby and Steve Robinson and I are talking with Jeff Holland of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation about the Foundations New Solutions Initiative 2024, where they got together seven different think tanks of diverse perspectives and asked them to come up with plans to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio. And they all did, from very different perspectives and had very different outcomes in terms of the policies that they would adopt, but they all met the goal of stabilizing the debt to GDP ratio and actually lowering it considerably from where it would be headed over 30 years under current law. And Jeff, when we took a break, we were talking a little bit about the tax policies that the plans came up with. What were some of the, you were talking about the expiration of the 2017 tax cuts where there are other commonalities in the plans over tax policy? Yeah, they're actually a surprising number of them and maybe some surprising debt fellows. So related to the expirations are the changes in tax rates that were implemented in 2017. All seven groups addressed tax rates in some form. Some essentially left them as the TCJ had them, some left them, but adjusted at the top level. Some changed the number of tax brackets, so they went a little bit beyond the TCJ framework. But they all felt that that was something that needed to be addressed. And most of them would raise the money that way. There were some other commonalities as well. Most of them were willing to do something about the step-up basis, like in terms of inherited wealth or what happens upon transfers upon debt and give taxes, things like that. So there were a number of policies trying to address that sort of element of the tax code. Five out of the seven groups chose to implement a carbon tax. It's actually fairly similar to what we saw when we did this in 2019. And five out of seven actually wanted to raise the gas tax, which hasn't been raised in over 30 years. So some of the non-individual income tax proposals also generated a fair amount of agreement. Also everyone pretty much did something about tax expenditures. Some were very specific, continuing the reduction in the state and local tax deduction or eliminating it altogether. Some were just more general about it, but basically eliminating all tax expenditures. But there's pretty widespread agreement that would be made for more economically efficient tax code. Tax expenditures being credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, special rates, all those different things that make the tax code a Swiss cheese. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just I want to go to Steve for some observations on Social Security. But the, you know, I co-taught a class at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law on Fiscal Policy last year, last fall. And the final, you know, paper was to come up with plans on fiscal sustainability. And a lot of them went for a carbon tax. I noticed that it was, you know, these were younger people, you know, students. And it was one of the more popular options. Don't know if it, everybody says, well, it'd be great, but it doesn't have much political viability. But people keep proposing it. So, you never know. I could potentially raise a lot of money. You know, it could be somewhat repressive too. If I hit lower income households higher, but even in some of the plans that organizations acknowledge that they sort of have a carve away to rebates on something to lower income households or to do something else to try and prevent it from hitting them, sorry. So yeah. That would, that would become a new tax expenditure. Yeah. I guess so too, but, you know, it could be part of the design of the carbon tax. Okay. Steve. Yeah. So we mentioned in the first part of the show, obviously the Social Security Medicare Trust funds are approaching insolvency. And so there have been numerous efforts over the years or numerous proposals made over the years, I should say, to address that. And one of the common elements, I guess two common elements, a lot of the plans appeared to agree that the retirement age should go up on the basis that people were living longer. You should raise the retirement age. And of course, the other big commonality was the taxable maximum under current law. People pay the payroll tax up to about 160,000 in wages. And then the tax ends there. Of course, people also send us free at the benefits also in there. The cap serves both as a limit on taxes and no benefits. All of the plans either would raise the cap somewhat in a couple of cases they proposed to eliminate it entirely. Presumably, they did not continue to pay benefits on unlimited wages. They raised the taxable cap but not the benefit cap, although that didn't seem to be specified in the summaries that I saw. What are your thoughts about the different approaches to Social Security? Yeah, I think the Social Security is one of the areas where I think there were a lot of commonalities. I mean, the main commonality is that they all produced adjustments to the program that would ensure solvency for at least the third year period that we were covering, again, in somewhat different ways. But they agreed that solvency, they want to prevent depletion of the trust fund. They all address benefits in some way. And a number of them actually suggested that there should be some sort of minimum benefit. So they wanted to make sure that lower income retirees were taking care of because Social Security has done a great job of limiting the amount of poverty among the older population. So there are a lot of ways of addressing benefits for organizations that suggest raising a retirement age, as you mentioned, and they would raise it either 69 or 70. And again, that included both right-leaning organizations like the American Action Forum and the Manhattan Institute, but also included the Progressive Policy Institute as well as the Bipolar Policy Pricing Center. You know, it shows that there is some agreement among organizations of different ideologies of raising a retirement age as a possible solution. As you mentioned, a number of them addressed revenues as well, either raising the payroll tax or more specifically increasing the cap that limits the amount of wages that are subject to the Social Security payroll tax. And again, that was bipartisan in nature, too. So I think, you know, there are a lot of elements of addressing Social Security, which is the largest program in the budget, where there are commonalities among the participants in the program. One of the other big levers of the federal budget is its healthcare spending. It seemed that there were kind of a wide variety of approaches to healthcare costs among the plans. I got the sense there wasn't quite as much commonality, except maybe in the area of trying to streamline things to make, you know, Medicare's got Part A and Part B and Part D and Medicare advantage, and there seemed to be some consensus around maybe bringing those together in some way. But anyway, what was the range of the healthcare proposals? Yeah, Bob, I think that's a fair assessment. I mean, I will say again, there was agreement that the trust funds needed to be bolstered. So all of the organizations said that their plans would bring the hospital insurance trust fund and they would make it solvent again over the 30-year period. So that's really important. But there were some differences in approaches in particular, sort of how to think about the program. So I think, as you said, one way to think about is to sort of streamline things, either by combining elements of the program or making them a little broader in nature. But that seems to me that's somewhat different than what other organizations were suggesting, which was like a premium support type of thing where Medicare and release would get a payment for themselves to choose their own health insurance. So they would get support to pay their premiums and then they would choose the program that sort of best meets their needs. And that would be a different approach than the current, either, well, it would be somewhat analogous to Medicare advantage, but different than the current fee for service kind of Medicare. So I think there are some differences there. There was some agreement on site neutral payments, again, sort of paying the same amount for the same services regardless of where they're performed. Right now, that's not really the case hospitals get paid more than sort of outpatient services for what oftentimes are similar services. There were some adjustments to the way taxes and premiums were collected to, but a little less than than with social security. So I think health care as, you know, as sort of witnessed over the past nearly 15 years since the Affordable Care Act was put in place is an area where there are more areas of or fewer areas of agreement, I should say. So I think that bringing up these various solutions at least enables us to sort of see what those benchmarks are and then see if continue the conversation to try and develop some sort of solutions. For the groups included immigration reform in their plans. Yeah. And so again, a choice that, you know, by CBO scoring of the Senate plan from a decade ago or so would help reduce a deficit by in general, raising more revenues than the costs that would be incurred under an immigration reform. So yeah, that's sort of a large scale policy that there was a sub agreement on as well. You're listening to face in the future. I'm your host Bob Bixby. Steve Robinson and I have been talking to Jeff Holland of the Peter G Peterson Foundation about their new solutions initiative plans that would try to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio over the long term. And Jeff, thanks for joining us. Steve and I will be right back after these short messages. Welcome back to Facing the Future, I'm your host Bob Bixby. In this segment, Conquered Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson and I will talk to Andrew Louds, Associate Director for Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He's the co-author of one of the seven fiscal sustainability plans that were released last week as part of the Peter G Peterson Foundation's Solutions Initiative. And that's what we were talking about in the prior segments with Jeff Holland. We'll be talking with authors of other plans in later shows, but we begin today by looking at the Bipartisan Policy Center's plan. Our guest works on tax and fiscal policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and previously he was Director of Federal Policy for the National Taxpayers Union and the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Andrew, welcome to Facing the Future. Bob, thank you for having me on and look forward to talking with you and Steve about our Solutions Initiative plan. All right. Well, and before we get started on that plan, I want to let everyone know that they can find the details to this and the other six plans on the Peterson Foundation's website, which is pgpf.org, pgpf.org. And of course, you can find the BPC plan at bipartisanpolicy.org. That's all one word, bipartisanpolicy.org. Your plan ended up with a budget that was roughly in balance by 2054 or 30 years from now. You brought down the debt to just below 60% of GDP. It's now about 100% and projected to go to 166%. So you really made a big dent in the debt. Did you start out with those goals or did you look at policies and just sort of come with me? Good question. You know, there's some element where, as all of the organizations are developing these plans of, you're not quite flying blind, but you don't have perfect visibility as you're developing these plans because, of course, as Jeff may have covered, and as your listeners may know, we partnered with Peterson partnered with Tax Policy Center to do some of the revenue modeling and scoring on the tax side of things. And then we were working with Barry Anderson, a former senior congressional budget office official on the spending side of things. And so you're trying to outline these policies and hope that you land on certain goals. And I can tell you, for VPC, we didn't have specific quantitative goals. We didn't have, hey, we really need to hit, you know, 50% debt to GDP in the 30th year or 60% or 75%. What we were more looking towards, and I know a lot of the other organizations were thinking in a similar way, was two priorities. The first is debt stabilization, and that can be defined in a multitude of ways. We basically said to ourselves, we would be satisfied if that line graph of debt to GDP instead of skyrocketing in the next 30 years, as it's currently projected to do so under the congressional budget office baseline, if that was flatter or even declining slightly over that 30-year window. And so we're happy to say we hit our mark there. And then our second goal, given that we are the bipartisan policy center, that our mission and our mandate is to propose policy solutions that are capable of winning sport on both sides of the aisle, bringing the two parties together to solve key challenges, was to have a fairly equal mix of revenue increases and spending cuts in the plan. Because we know that the preferred Democratic Party approach to reducing debt is by increasing taxes, and we know the preferred Republican Party approach to reducing debt is by decreasing spending. So where we came out when you exclude some of the items in there, such as immigration reform, which increases revenue, but it's not a tax increase in the traditional sense. And when you exclude macroeconomic feedback, the positive revenue effects we get from reducing the debts and from reforming the tax code, when you take out some of those elements, we were about a 55% to 45% mix of revenue increases and spending cuts. So I'm happy to say that we hit our mark there as well. This is the bipartisan policy center. Now there were seven plans and it's quite remarkable, and I don't think you could have planned this because you'd have had to have spied on the other organizations to be able to do it. But of the seven plans on spending by 2054, three of the other plans were higher and three of the other plans were lower. Well, like I said, I don't think you could have planned that, and if you did, my God, congratulations. Well, no, thank you for the kind words. We did not plan it, of course, because we could have an idea based on prior plans and based on what we know about our peer organizations and of some of the recommendations that they were going to land on, but we, of course, did not have a crystal ball. We didn't know where they would land on revenue as a representative GDP, spending as a percent of GDP. But, you know, I hope that the fact that we landed in the middle of our peer organizations on the center right and the center left, well, I hope it's an indicator of two things. First, that we gave really careful thought in our plan to having a balanced mix of revenue increases and spending cuts, and I think both on the broad comprehensive plan and on our social security reform proposal in particular, which builds off of some previous recommendations that BBC has made through a bipartisan commission that we convened in 2016, that Social Security Plan is a balanced mix of payroll tax increases on the one hand and benefit adjustments and reductions on the other hand. I hope it's an indicator that first and foremost that we did a good job of balancing spending of revenue, and second, that all seven organizations that participated in this did a great job at stabilizing debt to GDP, right, but the fact that we were able to land in the middle means that, you know, our partners on the center right gave thought to reducing spending as a percent of GDP compared to the current baseline, and our friends on the center left gave thought to increasing revenues as a percent of GDP based on the current baseline, and I think all seven of these plans will serve as a useful resource to policymakers if and when they get serious about addressing that debt. Steve, let me bring you into the conversation. Yeah, so going back to the politics, you talked about how you guys are sort of in the middle and you balanced the spending reductions with the tax increases, and I've said often on the show, as a politician, you probably are not going to have a winning campaign slogan if you say, "Vote for me, I'll raise your taxes and cut your benefits." From a policy perspective, you know, I think as these plans, all seven plans show, you know, you need to do a little bit of both, but you know, the political dynamics, particularly on the primary level, where Republicans are worried about getting primary by somebody to their right, and the Democrats are worried about getting primary by somebody to the left, it doesn't lend itself to that kind of compromise because you're seen as basically selling out your base or, you know, giving up on your principles. How do we finesse the politics of this? How do you get past the sort of normal, partisan resistance of the two sides to demand that, you know, if I could only do everything my way, if I could only do it on the spending side or I could only do it on the tax side, that'd be the perfect plan, but you know, I mean, I don't think that the politics are going to lend itself to us ever getting there, where one side is going to control the house and the Senate and the White House for long enough to get everything done their way, and then the risk they run is if they were to get it done their way, then the next Congress, if things changed, they could all be undone. So you have to figure out what is the bipartisan compromise that allows it to be a sustainable policy, and Bob and I have been watching this for a long time, and it just doesn't seem like we can ever figure out what's the right mix of politics and policy to get something done? What are your thoughts on just how do you divide up these issues? Well, it's a great question, Steve, and I think it requires a dual track here, and that dual track is doing some important behind-the-scenes work now, laying the groundwork with policymakers, their staff, other key stakeholders, while also being prepared for if and when we actually do reach a crisis point on the debt, and let me explain a little bit what I mean by each of those tracks. So we've given a lot of thought recently at BBC, and we'll be doing more of this work in the months ahead, so I'd encourage folks to, as you mentioned earlier, Bob, keep an eye on our website, bipartisanpolicy.org. We'll have a lot more content on this in the coming months, especially as we get closer to elections season. It is not enough for policymakers to acknowledge that our debt is rising, and then that poses economic and budgetary challenges for the nation, and right now, and it will for years, decades to come, unfortunately, that hasn't been enough to spur lawmakers in either party to action. In some sense, it sometimes feels like we're going backwards when you have both, at least as long as President Biden was still in the presidential race, you had both presidential nominees saying, "Hey, we're not going to touch social security," even though we know a crisis is coming in the years ahead. But I think where we have some potential here is to help policymakers and their staff and other stakeholders identify that if you care about some other issue, some other challenge, housing affordability, clean energy, national security, you should also care about the debt. So I think that's one track, and then the other track is having plans like these so that if and when we reach a crisis point, if investors, if treasury markets start to experience that crisis level, that we can be engaged with thoughtful ideas like those included in these seven proposals at the right time. You're listening to "Facing the Future." I'm your host Bob Bixby. We're talking about the bipartisan policy center's fiscal solutions plan, and we'll be right back after these short messages. Welcome back to "Facing the Future." I'm your host Bob Bixby. Steve Robinson and I are talking with Andrew Lowes, Associate Director for Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. And we're talking about a paper that his organization and six others contributed to a series by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation called Solutions, and they're trying to get the Solutions Initiative groups to produce plans that would stabilize the debt to GDP ratio. So Andrew, we talked a little bit about the philosophy behind your plan in the last segment. We want to get into some of the specifics. I guess there are three big drivers in all these plans for long-term sustainability, and that's Medicare and healthcare throughout the budget. Social security and revenues. And so, I want to begin with healthcare because that's probably the biggest spending challenge in the federal budget. Social security is a matter of money. Some of it comes in, some of it goes out. Healthcare, you've got healthcare incentive, the cost of providing healthcare. It's not just a simple matter of dollars in and dollars out, but several of the plans tried to do things that would increase the incentives for more efficient healthcare. And so, I wanted to look at some of the BPC's proposals. I was on the Riveland Domenici Task Force back in 2010 that was sponsored by the BPC. As I recall, we did a premium support system. I don't think you guys want that route this time. What was the thinking about, is that just too far now to do a bipartisan plan on premium support? But really, I'm more concerned with what you did do and why you did it. You know, candidly, as you put it Bob, rising healthcare spending, it's going to continue to put enormous pressure on the federal budget. And so, we worked closely with our health policy team at BPC, including our senior vice president, Bill Hoagland, who, of course, is a legend in the budget space and also has a lot of health policy expertise based on his background and experience. And our health team actually put together a bipartisan commission, a bipartisan group just last year in 2023, to address, you know, rising cost pressures, particularly in Medicare. And so, a lot of our recommendations actually stem from that 2023 bipartisan commission. So, what we focus on here is actually the Medicare Advantage program, because I think even especially since, you know, in the last decade or so, since BPC did the Domenici Riveland plan over a decade ago, you've seen these rising cost pressures in Medicare advantage. And so, what we focus on there is improving competition in the Medicare Advantage program, both within MA and between Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare. So, there are, you know, there are items in there like improving competitive bidding, modifying the risk adjustment methodology within Medicare Advantage, which informs, you know, how these plans are reimbursed and addressing improper payments in the program. We also rely on some health savings proposals that have long enjoyed bipartisan support. And that I know some of our peer organizations also included such as site neutral payments in Medicare, addressing some of the inefficiencies in how Medicare currently reimburses for services that I think there's been some bipartisan recognition has been misused or taken advantage of within the Medicare system. And so, that's really where we focus our efforts. And I'll just add, you know, for one more note that, you know, on the health side, we don't completely ignore it. And we're going to talk about taxes a little bit later, but we don't completely ignore the tax side here too. Obviously, the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance is a major revenue loser for the federal government. And so, we cap that exclusion at the 80th percentile of single and family employer-sponsored insurance plans, just not to completely guts that tax benefit, but to kind of put the brakes on what has really become a more and more costly expenditure in our tax code. Well, looking at those Medicare Advantage plans is really crucial because, you know, as you said, there are becoming much more popular, and there's the reason why. I mean, the payment systems are not as efficient as they should be, and to sort of promote the efficiency of care. So, I was glad to see you're getting into that part of it to help control costs. So, Steve, let me go to you for some questions about the social security proposals. Yeah, so it looks like back to threading the political needle between the two, between the two parties, you guys did a mix of changes in revenue and changes in benefits. I mean, the one arguably compromise on the tax side, as most people are aware, the social security payroll tax is capped. So, you only pay taxes on wages up to about $160,000. And you guys proposed to raise the cap, but you didn't go as far as some of the groups on the left that would have simply eliminated the cap. So, you sort of, and it's posed the groups on the right who didn't touch the cap at all. So, you're sort of right there in the middle on the revenue side. You raise additional revenue, but you don't go quite as far as some of the groups, some of the more liberal groups. On the benefits side, I mean, the one thing it's interesting, if you look at public opinion poll, you know, I think there's a majority of Americans that actually would support raising the retirement age as a way to help control cost and shore up the social security system. But when you look at a lot of the commentary on the left, a lot of the liberal and progressive groups, anytime you propose to raise the retirement age, you know, you can make the argument, "Well, people are living longer, so you should raise the retirement age." But what happens is the criticism or the criticism is that, yes, it's true, on average, people are living longer. But in fact, if you look at lower income, disadvantaged groups, their life expectancies have not gone up nearly as much as other people. And so, the retirement age proposal is often criticized from the left as being unfair to lower income, disadvantaged populations. What did you guys give that of any thought in terms of putting this proposal forward? We did. And these are challenging arguments to sort through, to think through, right? And I think our social security plan and what every other organization's social security plan should stress and emphasize for policymakers is that the longer that they wait to act on this, the closer we get to that crisis point where the trust fund is reaching insolvency, the more dramatic and the more painful, politically painful, and painful for beneficiaries and taxpayers, the solution is going to need to be. So that's, I think, you know, hanging over all of this, right? Is that the social security solutions required this time are more significant, more comprehensive than they were five years ago, 10 years ago, and another five years, they may still, you know, be more, you know, more significant, more comprehensive. I think two, you know, two things on our social security proposal. One is that, you know, it is a balanced mix, as mentioned earlier, of, you know, slowing benefit growth and increasing payroll taxes, well, while actually still including some technically progressive changes to social security meant to protect the lowest income retirees and beneficiaries. So we do, you know, keep in mind that that argument of, you know, trying to ensure that that, you know, low income retirees are held harmless or even, you know, from a benefits perspective made better off as we are still putting social security on a, on a long term, better trajectory. And then, you know, the second thing I know is we, we focus on a lot of gradual changes, right? The increase to the retirement age is done two months per year over the course of many years. So that it's not this sudden change. The payroll tax change is, is a tenth of a percentage point every year for 10 years until you get to that one percentage point increase. So it is a gradual change. We're trying to phase these in slowly, so that there are fewer shocks to the system for other beneficiaries or taxpayers while we're still putting the program on better long term financial putting. Okay, well, let's, let's end our discussion on something non controversial like taxes. What do you, what did you propose there? So there's a lot in the revenue bucket and I'll try to sum it up in 30 to 60 seconds. So, so I'll say first and foremost is that, you know, there's a $5 trillion elephant in the room that Congress needs to address before we even start talking about debt reduction. And that's the expiration of next year's tax cuts. The 2017 tax cuts, about $5 trillion worth of tax cuts are expiring next year, where I should say it's going to cost Congress about $5 trillion over 10 years to extend those tax cuts that they want to extend all of them. Before we even get to talking about debt reduction, we have to address that because both parties are going to want to extend at minimum trillions of dollars worth of tax cuts based on their various promises and pledges to voters. And so the first thing we do in our plan is we find a revenue neutral extension of those tax cuts. So we allow some tax rates to go up on higher earners. We keep the lower rates for some for more low income and middle income earners. We extend the doubled standard deduction from TCJ, but we also extend and expand on some of the limits on itemized deductions like the state and local tax deduction or salt and the mortgage interest deduction. And the charitable deduction. And then we go beyond that, beyond just TCJ extension by actually engaging in more comprehensive tax reform. So we do things like ending the tax exclusion for fringe benefits so that we're having a broader tax base and taxing more different types of employer benefits as income. So we also repeal what's called step up in basis, which is this rule in the tax code that allows primarily wealthy taxpayers to pass on assets to their errors without those assets, without the capital gains on those assets ever being taxed. And so we see that as sort of an administratively sound and legally ironclad method to increase taxes on high income individuals, whereas some of these other ideas that we've seen quoted out there like a wealth tax struggle with some may struggle in front of the Supreme Court on constitutional legal grounds. So we're engaging in that broader tax reform to raise revenue in a stable way, decades into the future. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for going through all that and best of luck with a plan. I hope that it gets a lot of attention on Capitol Hill. That's all the time we have for this week. You've been listening to Facing the Future. I'm your host Bob Bixby. Steve Robinson and I have been discussing a series of proposals that were released last week by the Peter G Peterson Foundation called Solutions Initiative 2024 on plans to reduce or limit or make sustainable the long-term debt. We'll be back next week with another edition of Facing the Future.