Fiscal Outlook 76 Options for Reducing the Deficit

From the Peter G. Peterson Foundation:

Debt in the United States is already the size of our entire economy and is projected to grow much higher. Fortunately, there are many ways to stabilize our fiscal outlook. Recently, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released 76 policy options — spanning both revenues and spending — that could help bring the country’s rising debt under control. Below are some of the policy options that would have the largest effects.

Options for Raising Federal Revenues

CBO presents 32 options that would affect revenues. Some provisions are likely to be part of the debate in 2025 as legislators revisit expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; others would modify unrelated provisions or create new types of taxes.

Eliminate or Limit Itemized Deductions: The largest option to reduce the deficit would be to eliminate all itemized deductions, which benefit taxpayers when the value of their deductions exceeds the amount of the standard deduction. That would reduce deficits by $3.4 trillion over the 10-year period from 2025 to 2034. Subsets of such reform include eliminating just the state and local tax deduction or limiting the tax benefit of itemized deductions to a certain percentage of their value.

Impose a 5 Percent Value-Added Tax: A value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax imposed on the incremental increase in the value of a good or service that occurs at each stage of a supply chain until the item is sold. Applying a 5 percent VAT would decrease the deficit by between $2.2 trillion and $3.4 trillion over 10 years, depending on the size of the base to which it is applied.

Impose a New Payroll Tax: The current payroll tax is levied on the earnings of people who work for an employer and on the net earnings of people who are self-employed and used to support programs such as Social Security and Medicare. CBO estimated the amount that could be raised by a new payroll tax that would be part of general revenues of either 1 percent ($1.3 trillion raised over the 2025-2034 period) or 2 percent ($2.5 trillion raised).

Impose a Surtax on Individuals’ Adjusted Gross Income: Most individual income is taxed on an amount that is reduced by certain deductions or exemptions. CBO estimated an option that would impose a surtax on a broader measure of income (adjusted gross income). Depending on the parameters of such a surtax (as defined in CBO’s option), it could garner between $1.1 trillion and $1.4 trillion in revenues over the 10-year period.

Options for Decreasing Mandatory Spending

CBO also presents 27 options that affect mandatory spending, which includes programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As those three programs are the largest categories of mandatory spending in the U.S. budget, reforming them has the potential to create the most savings.

Modify Payments to Medicare Advantage Plans for Health Risk: Medicare Advantage plans cover more than half of all Medicare beneficiaries. CBO offers three options to save money in Medicare Advantage by reducing payments to the program across-the-board or by making changes to its risk-adjustment policy. Savings from those policy measures range from $124 billion to $1 trillion over 10 years.

Establish Caps on Federal Spending for Medicaid: Currently, the federal government provides the majority of Medicaid’s funding and that funding has no ceiling — larger federal payments are generated automatically if enrollment or cost per enrollee increases. CBO estimates that if caps were established for total funding provided for each state, the government could save $459 billion over the projection period; establishing caps for the cost per enrollee, as specified by CBO, could generate savings of $893 billion over 10 years.

Establish a Uniform Social Security Benefit: Social Security benefits are calculated based on an individual’s average lifetime earnings, so individuals with higher earnings receive more retirement benefits than beneficiaries with lower earnings. CBO estimates that providing every beneficiary the same amount — either 150 percent or 125 percent of the federal poverty level — could save $283 billion or $607 billion, respectively, over the 10-year period.

Options for Decreasing Discretionary Spending

CBO provides 17 options that would affect discretionary spending. As nearly half of all discretionary spending is for defense, the option reforming that budget category has the greatest potential for deficit reduction.

Reduce the Department of Defense’s Annual Budget: According to CBO, addressing the Department of Defense’s annual budget could save $959 billion over the next 10 years. Reducing the number of active-component military personnel, reducing ground combat and air combat units, or relying on allies to provide their own defenses rather than using a U.S. combat force are possible methods of achieving the reform.

Although the United States carries significant debt due to a structural mismatch between spending and revenues, the new Administration and Congress have many possible options to address that gap.

Image by: Tom Brenner/Getty Images

Source: Peter G. Peterson Foundation

From the Peter G. Peterson Foundation:

Options for Raising Federal Revenues

Options for Decreasing Mandatory Spending

Options for Decreasing Discretionary Spending

Although the United States carries significant debt due to a structural mismatch between spending and revenues, the new Administration and Congress have many possible options to address that gap.

Image by: Tom Brenner/Getty Images

Source: Peter G. Peterson Foundation

For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.

The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”

Not anymore.

On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.

The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.

Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.

What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?

The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.

The rate cut narrative is calcifying into gospel: the Fed must cut to save the consumer.

Bankrate reports that 59% of Americans cannot cover a $1,000 emergency without debt or selling something. And yet stocks are roaring, liquidity junkies are celebrating, and the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending.

Here’s the plot twist: before 2020, consumer confidence faithfully tracked equity markets. After 2020, that relationship broke. As one analyst put it, “The poor don’t hate stocks going up. They just don’t feel it anymore.”

So when the Fed cuts rates in one of the hottest stock markets in history, who exactly benefits? Not the 59%. Not the middle. Certainly not anyone renting and watching shelter inflation devour their paycheck.

Only the late-stage dot-com fever dreams did better in recent memory — back when analysts were valuing companies by the number of mammals breathing inside the office.

For the moment, stocks appear unsinkable, unslappable, and perhaps uninsurable. But this is what generational technology shifts do: they take a kernel of genuine innovation and inflate a decade of growth into a 36-month highlight reel. We’ve seen this movie. It premiered in 1999 and closed with adults crying into their PalmPilots.

And just as the internet continued reshaping the world long after Pets.com curled up and died, AI will keep marching on whether or not today’s multiples survive a stiff breeze. The technology is real. The valuations, however, will eventually need to stop hyperventilating and sit down with a glass of water.

Wheelbarrows are not chickens. A chicken is a biological production unit. A wheelbarrow is a capital good. A wheelbarrow doesn’t produce work. But it CAN be a productivity multiplier.

And that’s how we have to think of all those GPUs the hyperscalers are spending money on. If their thesis is right, trillion in AI and data center spending now, will translate into a massive burst in productivity and new technologies in the next two decades. That is the only justification for the current valuations/multiples at which these stocks trade now.

The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “So much depends, upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.”

Today the wheelbarrow is Nvidia Green. And so much of the stock market depends on that wheelbarrow being a big enough productivity multiplier to offset $340 trillion in debt.