The Budgeting for National Priorities project promotes greater fiscal responsibility by developing new ideas, educating the public, and finding common ground among experts, influentials, and policymakers.
The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour Under the auspices of The Concord Coalition and together with The Heritage Foundation and other organizations, Brookings is touring the country to educate the public about our fiscal mess. These visits generally comprise a public event at a local university, a private breakfast with business and community leaders, and a meeting with the editorial board of the local newspaper. The Tour has been featured on the CBS newshour “60 Minutes” and in the documentary “I.O.U.S.A.,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and made its national debut in January 2009 on CNN. To date the Tour has counted more than 55 visits to cities nationwide.
The Fiscal Seminar The Fiscal Seminar, a bi-partisan group jointly run by Brookings and The Heritage Foundation, has been meeting since 2005. The Seminar brings together a group of policy and budget experts to discuss the dimensions of the nation’s budget problems and to consider various approaches and tools that might be used to combat those problems. Among the topics considered by the group have been reforms of taxes, Social Security, health care, and entitlements in general, as well as budget process changes such as automatic budget triggers and spending caps. Group members have produced numerous papers on those subjects which have benefited from the comments of other participants in the Fiscal Seminar.
Restoring Fiscal Sanity Book Series The purpose of this book series is to provide policymakers, advocates, and the general public with an accessible text on the choices required to return to fiscal responsibility. The series commenced in 2004 with the publication of Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget and continues with Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005: Meeting the Long-Run Challenge and Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2007: The Health Spending Challenge.
Opportunity 08
BNP worked closely with the Brookings-wide “Opportunity 08” effort to provide new ideas for presidential candidates. The project launched on February 28, 2007, and a paper by William Frenzel, Charles Stenholm, William Hoagland, and Isabel Sawhill—“Taming the Deficit: Forge a Grand Compromise for a Sustainable Future”—was published as part of this effort and also turned into an op-ed that appeared in The New York Times. Alice Rivlin and Joseph Antos published the paper “Slowing the Growth of Health Spending: We Need Mixed Strategies and We Need to Start Now” as part of this project.
Partnership with Public Agenda
Brookings is partnering with Public Agenda, as well as the Concord Coalition, The Heritage Foundation, and Viewpoint Learning, to hold dialogues in cities visited by the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. These meetings will allow residents to participate in a structured dialogue that will help them to understand the difficult choices that must be made. Previous in-depth dialogues conducted by Viewpoint Learning have demonstrated that the public is willing to make tough choices if they feel they can trust their elected officials.