Leaders of the White House's deficit commission say the U.S. economy will sink into a second recession if lawmakers do not clamp down on entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare.
Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-chaired the bipartisan deficit commission last year, warned members of Congress on Tuesday that failing to address bloated entitlement programs and needed tax code reforms could destabilize the nascent economic recovery within two years.
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Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.
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Is there any chance we can come to grips with our short-term and long-term fiscal problems -- the huge current federal budget deficit and the huge looming increases in entitlement spending? Maybe so. Or at least the chances seem a little better after the release of two sets of proposals in the weeks after the election.
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“I don’t know,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, responded to a question from the Examiner. “If you’re saying what spending reductions are Democrats looking at, I don’t know.” He has not heard any discussion of restraint on spending from Democratic members of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, even though he has frequently heard the refrain “everything is on the table.”
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An article in The Hill Saturday quotes two Republicans members of the White House’s Fiscal Responsibility Commission who say they haven’t ruled out a tax hike to deal with the nation’s unsustainable – and growing – debt.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/topics/alan-simpson
