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U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) today called on Congress and the White House to include the Save As You Go mechanism in its negotiations to ensure that Washington can’t run away from making the hard choices that need to be made on our dangerous annual deficits and staggering national debt.
Coons is a member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“Under our current budget process, the path of least political resistance is to keep revenues low while offering a high level of services,” Coons wrote in an op-ed appearing Friday in POLITICO.com. “Balanced budgets are fundamentally against the short-term interests of politicians from both parties. Our growing national debt is neither a Republican nor a Democratic problem, but rather a shared, structural problem. We need a way to keep both parties at the table.”
Save As You Go, or SAVEGO, is a backstop designed to ensure that, if Congress and the White House cannot save enough money each year to bring our budget back under control, their inaction will not lead to devastating economic consequences.
“To be successful, a real deficit deal will need to put everything on the table — from entitlements and revenue to domestic programs and Pentagon spending,” Coons wrote. “Our long-term deficit is too big to address by simply raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans or by slashing domestic spending – the math just doesn’t add up. Each side will have to give some cherished ideological ground as part of a compromise solution, and SAVEGO is the mechanism—the way of harnessing each party’s aversion to its own political kryptonite—to keep both sides at the table.”
SAVEGO was developed by the Bipartisan Policy Center and has been endorsed by former Republican Senator and Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee Pete Domenici, former Clinton White House Budget Director, Dr. Alice Rivlin, along with several respected policy thinkers Dr. Joe Minarik, Dr. Bill Hoagland, Charles Konigsberg, Steve Bell. For more on how SAVEGO works, go to: http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/projects/economic-policy-project/savego
Click here to see the full text of Senator Coons’ op-ed.
U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) today called on Congress and the White House to include the Save As You Go mechanism in its negotiations to ensure that Washington can’t run away from making the hard choices that need to be made on our dangerous annual deficits and staggering national debt.
Coons is a member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“Under our current budget process, the path of least political resistance is to keep revenues low while offering a high level of services,” Coons wrote in an op-ed appearing Friday in POLITICO.com. “Balanced budgets are fundamentally against the short-term interests of politicians from both parties. Our growing national debt is neither a Republican nor a Democratic problem, but rather a shared, structural problem. We need a way to keep both parties at the table.”
Save As You Go, or SAVEGO, is a backstop designed to ensure that, if Congress and the White House cannot save enough money each year to bring our budget back under control, their inaction will not lead to devastating economic consequences.
“To be successful, a real deficit deal will need to put everything on the table — from entitlements and revenue to domestic programs and Pentagon spending,” Coons wrote. “Our long-term deficit is too big to address by simply raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans or by slashing domestic spending – the math just doesn’t add up. Each side will have to give some cherished ideological ground as part of a compromise solution, and SAVEGO is the mechanism—the way of harnessing each party’s aversion to its own political kryptonite—to keep both sides at the table.”
SAVEGO was developed by the Bipartisan Policy Center and has been endorsed by former Republican Senator and Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee Pete Domenici, former Clinton White House Budget Director, Dr. Alice Rivlin, along with several respected policy thinkers Dr. Joe Minarik, Dr. Bill Hoagland, Charles Konigsberg, Steve Bell. For more on how SAVEGO works, go to: http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/projects/economic-policy-project/savego
Click here to see the full text of Senator Coons’ op-ed.
