Students flex fiscal muscles to win national competition

A proposal by economics students on how to stabilize the nation’s debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio won first place at the national collegiate Fiscal Challenge on Capitol Hill this spring. The Fiscal Challenge is a competition among college teams to create a plan putting the U.S. on a sustainable fiscal path.
“Our team put a tremendous amount of work into developing their budget proposal,” said Raymond “Skip” Sauer, the John E. Walker Department of Economics chair and team adviser. “They’ve been meeting three days a week since January and the collaboration of all five of them gave them the ability to attack the budget challenge on all possible fronts. What they did on Capitol Hill was impressive and very hard to replicate in a classroom.”
Judging was conducted by a group of four federal budget experts associated with major Washington think tanks and government organizations. Mike Aguilar, national coordinator, said the winning proposal “struck a nice balance between spending cuts and tax increases. One thing that set Clemson apart was their advocacy of supply-side changes to stimulate growth and their support for structural reforms to the budget process itself.”