We Updated the Debt Fixer and Released Results Showing Americans Can Fix the Debt

We have updated our popular Debt Fixer interactive budget tool, just as Congress faces another deadline to keep the government funded and avoid a shutdown. Over 180,000 users visited the tool over the past year to try their hand at making many of the same budget choices that policymakers face and see how those decisions affect the national debt.

The newly updated tool includes new options such as rolling back recent defense and non-defense discretionary spending increases in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019, providing free community or public college, replacing Obamacare with state grants, instituting a wealth tax, enacting a temporary payroll tax holiday, and implementing a financial transactions tax. It also includes new short-term and long-term debt goals.

In conjunction with the launch of the updated tool, we are also releasing results from the previous version, where over 10,000 users submitted results. Here are some highlights:

• 69 percent of users successfully reached the goal of reducing the debt to 70 percent of the economy in ten years.

• 62 percent hit the benchmark of reducing debt to 40 percent of GDP by 2050.

• The average user achieved $7.6 trillion in debt reduction over a decade. 75 percent of users attained at least $7 trillion in savings, and another 11 percent identified $5 to $7 trillion in savings, enough to stop the debt from climbing further.

• If one only chose options with majority support, debt would remain stable at below 80 percent of the economy over the next decade and fall to nearly 40 percent in 2050. The results indicate broad support for many policies that together can reduce the debt substantially.

See the full results here.

With trillion-dollar deficits returning and national debt already at historically high levels and rising, the Debt Fixer is an opportunity for Americans to show policymakers how to build a responsible budget and fix the debt.