Pursuit announces 3rd annual scholarship competition; video or essay on debt, accountabilty issues

Founded by the late Dr. Tom Coburn, Pursuit is a non-partisan organization aimed at making government transparent, exposing wasteful spending, and inspiring future generations to get involved. They recently announced their third annual scholarship competition. Read below for details:

3RD ANNUAL SCHOLARSHIP COMPETITION
[OurPursuit.com]

There is a lot at stake for the future of young Americans. Even prior to the response to the crisis we are currently facing, both political parties had already placed our nation on an unsustainable fiscal course. In the absence of decisive action from our leaders, one generation of Americans is about to leave the next generations with an unbearable financial burden.

The national debt is more than $25 trillion, soon to exceed the size of our entire economy. There is another $100 trillion in unpaid for promises coming down the pike. Report after report warns of wasteful spending and unsustainable deficits, yet year after year nothing is done by our elected leaders to address them.

If this continues, millennials and generation Z will spend their peak earning years paying for the excesses and promises they had no knowledge of or say in. However, this is not an unsolvable problem. It’s a grand opportunity. But young Americans must start speaking up now.

Pursuit will award four scholarships to incoming Freshmen, Sophomores, or Juniors enrolled in an American university or community college who produce a video (maximum 5 minutes) or write an essay (maximum 2500 words) on one or a combination of the following topics:

Book Review: Tom Coburn's 'The Debt Bomb'

Senator Tom Coburn versus Everyone Else in Washington

by Dustin Siggins

In The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan To Stop Washington From Bankrupting America, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) explains how Washington's career politicians, staffers, and lobbyists have set the nation up for fiscal failure.  Pulling few punches, Coburn targets sacred cows of each party and explains that rather than being in gridlock (as the media claims is the case), Congress has spent the last several decades (and especially the last 15 years) working to expand influence and re-election capabilities regardless of party.

Opening with a story about how America's rising debt could cause first a financial, and then a military crisis by 2020, Coburn reminds readers that this country is only as powerful as its finances will allow it to be.  In this fictional-but-likely future, foreign investors decide in 2014 that America is no longer a viable financial investment.  Over a span of days, this new consensus works its way into the value of the dollar, sinking it by 50% and increasing inflation.  Riots become widespread, the National Guard is deployed, and the G-20 meets to tell the U.S. that tax rates will double, retirement ages will leap precipitously, and means-testing will be the order of the day on benefits.  Finally, in 2019 -- two years after employment finally drops from 24% -- China invades Taiwan and informs the U.S. that if we stop the invasion, the U.S. will lose both financially (as China dumps our debt) and militarily (as both nations perhaps engage in a nuclear exchange).

Unlike other authors, Coburn takes on the debt from a series of critical angles, not just partisan ones.  This is done in a way that breaks through the fog of D.C.-speak and explains in plain terms the corruption all too present in Washington.  The impacts of the debt on the unemployment rate, national security, retirement, social welfare, personal freedom, tax rates, energy reform, and morality each have portions of chapters (in some cases, whole chapters) dedicated to them.  Additionally, Coburn aims to show just how much smaller government could be if we just eliminated fraud/waste/abuse/duplicity from the federal government...as much as one-third, or over $1 trillion per year (nearly $3,900 for every American every year).  If nothing else, the disgust readers should have for their elected politicians is a victory in and of itself, and it should lead to a successive series of efforts by voters to term-limit members of Congress.

The most important reforms Coburn addresses are those related to duplication/oversight, military spending, taxes, and entitlements.  With an envious lack of ego, Coburn looks at the problem from the perspective of an outsider involved in the process rather than as an elitist insider who knows all the answers.  Does the senator have answers?  Yes.  Does he think his are the only ones?  Absolutely not.  While his own oversight reports and Back in Black solutions are regularly mentioned both in chapters and in an addendum, Coburn praises Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), among others, for truly working to find a way to defuse our debt bomb.

The inside baseball Coburn exposes should embarrass both members and their constituents.  Earmarks, personal discussions, and careerism are all brought to the fore, but nothing is more "inside baseball" than the debate that took place leading up to the debt ceiling compromise last August.  The utter dysfunction of Congress is laid bare in Coburn's descriptions of what happened.  Meeting after meeting and discussion after discussion led to a deal that not only didn't cut spending, but actually grew spending by $2 trillion over ten years...and still left our nation's credit rating downgraded.

(click "read more" for the rest of this review)

Column: Pity the debt-paying generation

Pity the debt-paying generation

By Bill Beach and Dustin Siggins

The Heritage Foundation

The outlook for the Debt-Paying Generation - those young Americans on the hook for our monstrous national debt - keeps getting worse.

Take two developments in just in the last two months: First, the Congressional Budget Office released an update showing that since last year the amount of debt it expects America to carry (as a percentage of GDP) in 2035 has jumped significantly.

Second, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner each made it clear that they think cutting less than 10 percent of spending over the next 10 years is a responsible way to govern.

The CBO report continues a long series of annual warnings that the fiscal future is getting steadily grimmer: "Debt held by the public is now projected to grow even faster in the next decade under the alternative fiscal scenario than CBO projected last year. ... By 2021, it would exceed 100 percent of GDP, 10 percentage points higher than projected in 2010. In later years, debt would follow a path similar to what CBO projected last year, reaching almost 190 percent of GDP in 2035, effectively the same level as projected previously."

As columnist Peggy Noonan noted some months ago, part of the reason for the existence of the tea party is that compromise in Washington is often between moderates and liberals, not liberals and conservatives.

For example, the CBO said the initial phase of the Boehner compromise would take the debt per worker in 2021 from about $161,631 to about $156,324 - clearly, laughably inadequate. As one of us once wrote, "You can't balance the federal budget and stay inside today's policy lines. Rethink the lines, however, and you'll be amazed how quickly we could move toward fiscal sanity. It's all a matter of those tricky lines."

Thinking outside the lines is just why we are writing a book about the Debt-Paying Generation. It's also why Bill Beach was a lead author of a recent Heritage Foundation report on a plan to return to a balanced budget.

In that plan ("Saving the American Dream"), Heritage called for achieving permanent budget surpluses by 2021; pro-growth tax reform; and entitlement reform. While there is plenty of room for debating how we get to permanent total budget surpluses, the fact is that we need real solutions - and fast.

Heritage's plan is but one answer, but it is one that can work.

Unfortunately, except for rare exceptions such as Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., both of whom have plans that would balance the budget sooner than anyone else on Capitol Hill, much of Washington would rather pay attention to the latest Washington sex scandal than worry about the real threat that is America's growing national debt.

When it really comes down to it, the budget debate can be reduced to the following points:

1. Reform our immoral and inefficient tax code, perhaps by replacing it with a flat expenditure tax, such as Heritage proposed. A strong period of economic growth will be needed to help lift us out of our fiscal mess, and the flat expenditure tax frees the economy to grow at its potential while supplying government with the revenues it needs.

2. Cut spending. To start, basically anything ending with "Department" or "Administration" should be closely scrutinized for need and effectiveness. Doubtless hundreds of billions in outlays each year could be saved by reforming broken programs and eliminating those that simply don't work. Entitlements, of course, must be reformed.

3. Shrink the size of government employee rolls. Fully one-sixth of America's workers are employed by some level of government, and when one adds the millions of defense and other contractors into the mix, more than 30 million people are employed by tax dollars. These are dollars that, instead of expanding the economic pie or tax revenue are simply recycled. We support cutting 10 percent of all government employees or contractors, to start.

As James Agresti recently noted in The Daily Caller, the longer that Americans bury their collective heads in the sand, the more extreme solutions will have to be. Today's seniors and near-seniors could have supported minor increases in retirement ages; partial or full privatization; or any of a number of other options 20 years ago to entitlements that would have made Medicare and Social Security better off today and in the foreseeable future. They could have voted for politicians who wanted a fair tax code instead of one riddled with special-interest loopholes.

Instead, the status quo was largely kept in place. Now solutions must be drastic if we are to prevent the Debt-Paying Generation from bearing the consequences of the decisions of their parents and grandparents.


About the writers

William Beach is director of the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation. Dustin Siggins is a former policy researcher in the Center for Data Analysis at Heritage. Readers may write to the authors in care of The Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, D.C. 20002; Web site: www.heritage.org. Information about Heritage's funding may be found at http://www.heritage.org/about/reports.cfm.