Today, President Obama held a press conference with Congressional leaders to announce his support for enactment of a statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rule.

The Obama administration’s proposal looks to build off the PAYGO rules put in place during the 1990s. Similar to them in design, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would keep a running scorecard for the costs associated with enacted legislation for each year through 2014 and compare those costs to the established baseline. If the scorecard found the cumulative effect of enacted legislation to increase the deficit, OMB would be required to reduce spending in certain non-exempt mandatory programs to balance the difference -- a process called sequestration. Although sequestration under PAYGO was never actually ordered in the 1990's, the existence of this automatic trigger provides some incentive for members of Congress to be fiscally disciplined.

While PAYGO has recently been in place for a few years, it has only existed as a congressional rule which has often been waived or ignored for legislation requiring politically difficult trade-offs. The proposal that President Obama put forward, and that the...

Listening to President Obama’s weekly address on Saturday was a rollercoaster experience for me. At times, I was lifted by his message of fiscal discipline. At other times, I was depressed by his unwillingness to connect fiscal discipline with politically difficult choices.

It started out well with the President’s observation that “the cost of confronting our economic crisis is high. But we cannot settle for a future of rising deficits and debt that our children cannot pay.”

Then came the first downward plunge when the President proclaimed, “we have identified two trillion dollars in deficit reductions over the next decade.” 

This statistic is based on savings achieved from a contrived “baseline.” If you assume that war spending remains at the current level adjusted for inflation over the next 10 years, you can get a lot of “deficit reduction” by reducing that commitment -- as even the Bush Administration was planning to do. And, if you assume that all of the Bush tax cuts are permanent, which they are not, you can get more “deficit reduction” by assuming that a portion of them will not be extended, which is what would happen anyway under current law. So there isn’t really a lot of deficit reduction in the $2 trillion figure the President cited, and no hard choices.

As you recover from what was hopefully a fun-filled St. Patrick's Day, it might be helpful if I were able to convert our latest issue brief into a fun, bite-sized and easily digestible, bullet list of the most interesting things we found in President Obama's first budget submission to Congress.

First some background: in general, every presidential budget is significant because it establishes the priorities and issues which the administration perceives to be most important and how they plan to address and resolve them. The first budget of a new administration is even more important in that it sets expectations for the coming years and how these policies reconcile with the promises made during the campaign. The submission the Obama Administration made at the end of February was just an outline of the larger budget they will present later in the year, but with enough information that Congress can turn towards creating the Congressional budget resolution in the next month or two.

Unlike the iconic shamrock used on St. Patrick's Day, our issue brief contains more than "three leafs" of knowledge [and you should still read the issue brief!]:

• The...

Today’s Washington Post contains a very welcome front-page headline, “Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform.” The article explains that President-elect Obama plans to convene a fiscal responsibility summit in February. According to the Post story:

President-elect Barack Obama pledged yesterday to shape a new Social Security and Medicare "bargain" with the American people, saying that the nation's long-term economic recovery cannot be attained unless the government finally gets control over its most costly entitlement programs.

That discussion will begin next month, Obama said, when he convenes a "fiscal responsibility summit" before delivering his first budget to Congress. He said his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market.

"What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further," he said. "We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure...