Peter G. Peterson. Mr. Peterson has been a prominent figure weighing in on budget debates for close to two decades. Mr. Peterson was the Commerce Secretary in the Nixon administration. He then went on to make billions of dollars as one of the top executives at the Blackstone Group, a private equity fund. Mr. Peterson is known as one of the top beneficiaries of the fund managers’ tax break, through which he personally pocketed tens of millions of dollars.Mr. Peterson has never been shy about using his Wall Street wealth to try to cut Social Security and Medicare, and he recently stepped up his efforts. Last year he spent $1 billion to endow the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which seems to have destroying these programs at the top of its agenda. (Mr. Peterson also has a think tank named after him, the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics.)
Peterson’s main story is that these programs are bankrupting the government and will impose an unbearable burden on future generations. Of course, the reality is that we have a broken health care system. The projections of scary budget deficits that Peterson’s crew constantly cites is based almost entirely on projections of exploding health care costs. If the United States can get its health care system in order, as every other country has done, then we would be projecting enormous budget surpluses as far as the eye can see.
