The present track the federal government is following “will destroy the country from within,” Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, claimed recently.
Forgive us for sounding morbid, but that kind of talk is sweet music to our ears.
Why? Because the nation needs this wakeup call.
Yes, it is good to see the folks President Obama tasked with finding solutions to America’s runaway debt and long-term budget problems are taking their assignment seriously.
Addressing the nation’s governors last week, the co-chairmen of the bipartisan commission to cut the deficit and debt offered warnings in just the kind of stark terms needed. Bowles and Simpson need to keep up that level of urgency to convince lawmakers too accustomed to spending money that they have to get serious about restructuring the government’s finances. Now.
There is some evidence the conversations and debate about the nation’s runaway debt — now at almost $13.2 trillion, or about $42,608 per citizen — is getting lawmakers’ attention. Last week, several news agencies reported that a growing number of Democrats and Republicans in Congress are preparing to tinker with Social Security — a politically delicate move if ever there was one.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, have suggested raising the age for full retirement benefits from 67 to as high as 70, for those who wouldn’t retire for at least 20 years.
The plan would only solve about a third of Social Security’s long-term problems, but it would help. On its present course, the popular retirement program is estimated to run out of money by 2037.
You could almost hear the echoes of the debt commission’s warning in Hoyer’s remarks in Washington last week.
“We’re lying to ourselves and our children if we say we can maintain our current levels of entitlement spending, defense spending and taxation without bankrupting our country,” the House majority leader said.
Indeed. Economists warn that the country’s budgets are built on a foundation that is no longer structurally sound. The entitlement spending Hoyer mentions — the vast Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other mandatory programs — has in the last decades consumed more and more of taxpayer dollars. The programs combined now total about 60 percent of the budget.
And deficit spending of more than $1 trillion a year in recent years is so unsustainable that military experts now warn it has become a significant threat to national security.
We’ve been supportive of the idea of the debt commission, but expressed concerns about whether President Obama would follow through with its recommendations after calling for greater government spending during the recent Group of 20 gathering.
The debt commission is supposed to present its findings, which are non-binding, shortly after Election Day.
Thankfully, the report by Bowles and Simpson to the National Governors Association last weekend suggests its members are properly focused.
