Transcript

RON HASKINS: Welcome to Brookings. Thanks for coming. My name is Ron Haskins and, along with my colleague Belle Sawhill, I run an organization here called the Center on Children on Families. And we also run another organization as part of our Center called the Budgeting for National Priorities, and we’ve been conducting activities for almost a decade. The kind of things that scholars do, especially focused on the federal budget deficit.

And our goal has been to do three things, really. First, sound the alarm. There’s a deficit out there, it could hurt us, we need to do something. Secondly, to propose specific solutions for what we should do about the deficit. And third, to agitate. And we’ve been doing all these things for many, many years. We’ve joined with other organizations in town, other think tanks and organizations. We’ve published three books, we’ve published numerous articles, op-eds, testified, we’ve tried to organize what you might call information sessions for senior staffers and members of Congress and members of the administration. We’ve met personally with lots of senior officials. So, we’ve done everything that we could think of to do within the boundaries, roughly speaking, of the scholarly world to try to bring attention deficit in to get somebody to do something about it.

So, as you might imagine, now is a time that we are really enjoying it. It looks, at last, as if people have actually recognized that we have a deficit. And not only that, but we have several compelling plans on the board. And of course, nobody agrees with everything on any of the plans. But I think so far it’s been remarkable how much at least the analysts have accepted these plans and realized that they’re very serious efforts and that something roughly along these lines is required in order to solve the deficit.

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