Forty years, signed

The four rules it was written by

One: nothing unscored. Every plank is a CBO option, carried with CBO’s own title and CBO’s own ten-year number. No dynamic magic, no growth assumption doing the heavy lifting, no “waste, fraud and abuse” line. Together the planks score $13.6 trillion over CBO’s own ten-year window and settle at 3.69 per cent of GDP.

Two: both sides, in the open. The package is 57 per cent revenue and 43 per cent spending. Room III proved why: there is no arrangement of scored spending cuts alone that stabilises the debt. Anyone selling you one is not holding the list.

Three: prices before people. Not one plank removes a person from a programme they are enrolled in. The health savings — the largest block in the plan — come out of what the government pays hospitals, insurers and drug channels, not out of who is covered. Where a beneficiary does feel it, the plank says so in its own line.

Four: slow, and dated. Nothing lands on the first January. The earliest planks bite in 2028; the retirement-age change is still phasing in fifteen years later. Debt keeps rising to 105 per cent in 2030 before it turns, because that is what a plan people can actually live through looks like.

What it buys

The line crosses back under a hundred per cent of GDP in 2036 and reaches 61 per cent by 2067, near the 60 per cent the plan is written against. Sixty per cent of GDP is roughly where the debt sat in 2008, before two crises and two decades of borrowing through them. It is not a magic number. It is a level the country has actually carried, and one that leaves room to borrow the next time something goes wrong.

The largest single dividend is the one nobody campaigns on: interest. Because a dollar not borrowed does not accrue, the plan avoids $104.6 trillion of interest over the forty years — more than the entire ten-year score of every plank in it combined. That is the compounding working for the country instead of against it, and it is the whole reason acting early costs less than acting well.

What it costs you

Everyone. That is not rhetoric, it is arithmetic: three quarters of federal spending is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defence, veterans and interest, and interest does not take a vote. A package big enough to matter either touches programmes most households use or taxes most households pay. This one does both, thinly, for forty years, rather than dramatically for one.

The plan names its own worst moments rather than hiding them. The consumption line in Article V reaches every household in the country, which is why the rebate is written into the same section. Means-testing the lowest veterans’ disability ratings is the hardest sentence on this page, and it is pulled well below CBO’s setting for that reason. If you strike them, strike them on the plate — and watch what the rest of the country has to carry instead.

The plan in six lines

1. I The rule. A target in statute, reported on every year, with a trigger nobody can vote away quietly.
2. II Pay for care at one price. Health savings come out of what the government pays, not out of who is covered.
3. III Keep the promise solvent. Social Security is made to balance at the top of the benefit scale and the index, not at the bottom.
4. IV Broaden the base before raising a rate. Spending that runs through the tax code is spending. It is cut first.
5. V Tax consumption, thinly. A small, broad consumption line — the thing every peer country has and the United States does not.
6. VI Discipline the discretionary side. Defence and non-defence take the same haircut, so neither can hide behind the other.

What is ours, and what is not

The baseline is CBO’s, through 2056. The scores are CBO’s. Four things are ours and are modelled rather than projected: which options are in the plan and how hard each is pulled; the enactment calendar; holding each plank flat as a share of GDP after CBO’s ten-year window closes; and extending the baseline from 2057 to 2067 by holding CBO’s final-year shares of GDP and growing nominal GDP at 3.56 per cent a year — the average rate CBO itself projects over its last decade. The plate marks the year CBO stops and our extension begins.

Interest is never a plank. It is solved each year at the effective rate implied by CBO’s own published interest and debt lines, so the feedback in this plan is CBO’s rate and not a rate we liked the look of.