Facing Up: How to Rescue the Economy from Crushing Debt and Restore the American Dream
by By Peterson, Peter G.
Category: Business & Economics , General

Facing Up is like a powerful dose of truth serum injected into the body politic of America's debate over budgets and deficits, investment and productivity - and, ultimately, the future of the American Dream.In these pages, Peter G. Peterson, former United States Secretary of Commerce and one of Wall Street's preeminent investment bankers, dares to speak the "unspeakable" - truths that most of Washington's establishment, Democrats and Republicans alike, find too politically dangerous to acknowledge to the public.Among the sobering facts presented in Peterson's compelling argument are: Despite the talk of deficit reduction in Washington, the Clinton administration's own budget forecasts show that another trillion dollars will be added in the next four years to the already bloated national debt; onerous as today's deficits are, they are early warning signs of the more nightmarish reality to come if we don't get the exploding costs of Medicare, Social Security and other "entitlement" programs under control; although most people think "welfare" goes to the poor, the vast majority of U.S. entitlement spending is diffused without any regard to financial need. Only one-sixth of all entitlement dollars serves to raise Americans out of poverty; today's leadership generation - accustomed to avoiding hard choices and to financing today's lavish consumption with debt - is the first to turn its back on the young, the future, and the promise of increased opportunity for all; without rigorous cost-controlling reforms, health care will continue to be the "Pac-Man" of GNP eating up ever-larger resources as baby boomers age and more people live into their eighties and nineties.The Reaganomic approach to deficit reduction was doomed because of its reliance on curtailing benefits to the poor. The Clinton approach is flawed because of its reliance on soaking the rich. Pointing out the most politically explosive truth of our day, Peterson shows that balancing the budget requires a measure of sacrifice from the broad American middle class as well as the truly wealthy.In its concluding chapter, Facing Up offers the fairest, most detailed, most compassionate, and most workable program ever presented for zeroing out the budget deficit and turning it to surplus by the year 2000. Using an "affluence test" for entitlement programs that would end welfare for the well-off, and showing how to make the needed choices and trade-offs, Peterson's plan is certain to be widely debated. It is the new benchmark by which to judge the sincerity of our political leaders and their commitment to balancing the budget and "doing the right thing" for America's children and our national future.