Saving the American Dream: The Heritage Plan to Fix the Debt, Cut Spending, and Restore Prosperity

Saving the American Dream is The Heritage Foundation’s plan to fix the debt, cut spending and, above all, restore prosperity. It balances the nation’s budget within a decade—and keeps it balanced. It reduces the debt and cuts government in half. It eliminates government-mandated health care and fully funds our national defense. It squarely confronts Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the three so-called entitlement programs, which together account for 43 percent of federal spending today.
To encourage Americans to become more fiscally responsible, the Heritage plan redesigns our entire tax system into an expenditure tax that will have a single, flat rate. This is a structure that will promote savings, therefore benefiting individual Americans, our body politic, and the economy.
At the end of the day our plan, while economic in nature, has a higher moral purpose. If entitlements are not reformed, the next generation and future ones will have to pay punitive tax rates that will end liberty as we have known it. Our proposal, which was funded by a grant initiative set up by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, aims to preserve America’s promise bequeathed to us by past generations.

Foreword
Fellow Americans:
We have come to a time of decision. For far too long, Congress has been on an unsustainable binge of spending, taxing, and borrowing. Our nation is going broke, and we are passing the costs of these misguided policies to our children and their children.
Over time, our national government has become bloated, overextended and unrestrained, oblivious of its core functions, operating far beyond its means and vastly outside of its proper constitutional bounds. Unchecked, the course we are on now will cripple our economy, undermine our prosperity, and lead to fiscal insolvency. By robbing the future of opportunity and freedom, it will destroy the American Dream for future generations.
Already, we are living through the shame of being publicly lectured by our Communist Chinese creditors, who have contempt for our profligacy. The day it was announced that Standard & Poor’s had lowered the outlook on our economy, a collective gasp went through the international community. If our elected leaders keep it up, we are certain to face financial crises like Greece or Portugal.
America is on the verge of becoming a country in decline—economically stagnant and permanently debt-bound, heavily regulated and bureaucratic, less self-governing and less free.

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