Our Mission

The mission of The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is to enhance public understanding of the nature and urgency of selected key sustainability challenges that threaten America’s future, to propose sensible and workable solutions to address these challenges and to build public will to do something about them.

The Foundation's initial focus will be on:

• Unsustainable entitlement benefits.  As 78 million baby boomers retire, America’s unfunded entitlement promises (i.e., Medicare and Social Security) exceed three times the annual GDP of the country.
   
• Unsustainable current account deficits, primarily accounted for by unprecedented trade deficits.  Now at twice previous record levels, these leave America dangerously dependent on foreign capital and require America to save much more both at the national and personal levels.
   
• Unsustainable and ballooning healthcare costs.  These costs are now more than twice as high per capita as the rest of the developed world with no appreciable differences in health outcomes or longevity.  And, this healthcare system leaves 47 million Americans uninsured.
  
  
• Unsustainable and gluttonous energy consumption - and its first cousin, global warming.  With less than five percent of the world’s population, America accounts for 25 percent of the world’s consumption of oil.  This gluttonous consumption leaves America dangerously dependent on unfriendly and unstable foreign sources of oil and, in some cases, fuels terrorist activities.  Most energy experts agree that, of course, over the longer term, building alternative energy sources is important, but if the energy challenge is to be resolved over the near-to-mid term, it must be resolved, basically, on the demand side through conservation and not the supply side.
   
• Unsustainable competitive gaps in our educational system.  America’s economic leadership in an increasing competitive global economy is not sustainable when half of the young in our urban areas and 30 percent of all young Americans do not graduate from high school.  Nor is it sustainable in an increasingly technological world where the capacity to do basic research and to invent the next big technologies is crucial and where Asian countries are now producing more master degree and PhD technology graduates than the United States.  Furthermore, America's education system is not doing an adequate job in the areas of financial literacy and civics.
   
• The undeniable, transcendent threat to our collective future: The potential for nuclear and biological warfare materials falling into the hands of terrorists.