Judd Gregg: Five keys to a better budget

In an op-ed in The Hill, former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) argues that whoever is President next year should eschew the standard President's budget--with its detailed line-by-line policies and numbers--and instead issue a budget submission with a few big policies. As he says:

A line-by-line budget submission simply allows Congress to distract everyone, including itself, into debates over high visibility-but-small return issues like defunding the National Endowment for the Arts or National Public Radio.

The president should instead send a set of major policy changes in no more than five or six critical and significant areas.   

The policies should, if enacted in a form reasonably similar to those proposed, correct the fiscal course and right a good portion of the listing federal ship.

The president’s budget submission should force Congress to act in areas that count as real spending and tax reform.

The policies should be few, because Congress tends to have difficulty managing too many ideas at once.

They should be hugely meaningful in their long-term impact on the affordability of our government.

He specifically details five areas: Social Security reform, health care/Medicare reform, tax reform, the "grand bargain" of giving Medicaid responsibility to the federal government and education responsibility to the states and localities, and reform of the Defense Department.

Click here to read more about what Gregg suggests.

"My Views" are works published by members of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, but they do not necessarily reflect the views of all members of the committee.