romineia with budgetary affairs at the heritage foundation and jason ficener is a senior research fellow at the mercades center. we'll have a 30-minute conversation here thank you. i've asked both jason and romina to give brief opening remarks and then we'll open it up for questions. rominea, could you begin? >> thank you for the introduction, tim. thank you all for being here today. i want to focus my remarks on how the new congress can control government spending and reduce waste and so i'm so pleased to follow representative price with those remarks. the first thing that the house and senate have an opportunity to do now is to agree on a budget resolution. and that budget resolution needs address growing spending and debt at its root. the current half a trillion dollar deficit of this year has been hailed as a great improvement but to the extent that it is an improvement, it is a very fleeting one indeed because before the end of the decade, the deficit is projected to exceed trillion dollar levels again so in order to rein in this growing deficit, it's important that we understand wh