Save America $2 Trillion

DocuTicker A good government group identified another $1 trillion in savings and new revenues to reduce the deficit.

The goal of the bipartisan commission is to balance the budget by 2015 and strengthen the government's long-term financial health.

In The Next Trillion: Fiscal Responsibility Through More Accountability, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group identified a trillion dollars in savings and additional revenue sources by 2015 through, among other measures, holding the government more accountable for how it spends taxpayer dollars. This "next trillion" comes on top of an initial trillion identified earlier this spring.

When the Commission was founded last February, U.S. PIRG look ed at the existing tax code for loopholes, reviewed government reports on wasteful contracting practices and came up with The First Trillion, an initial list of ways the government can save a trillion dollars by 2015.

In The Next Trillion, U.S. PIRG continued its research to find another trillion dollars that the U.S. government and taxpayers can save.

Key deficit reduction measures include:

• $160 billion in savings within the Medicare program by the use of electronic records, better alignment of payments to costs and ending inflated payments to pharmaceutical companies for prescription drugs;
• $185 billion in savings by ending the practice of purchasing supplies and spare parts that go unused across different branches of the military, and
• $884 billion in new revenue by implementing a fractional speculation fee on certain stock, bond, options, swap, futures and foreign exchange spot transactions. 

Read full at The Next Trillion: Fiscal Responsibility Through More Accountability