Kasich/Panetta: The Next Step for Responsible Spending & Debt Reduction
Gov. Kasich teamed up with former Congressman, Defense Secretary, CIA Director and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to co-author this op-ed. You can read the full op-ed (here) on The Hills’s website.
Read an excerpt below:
"For that reason, we agree with McCarthy, when he insists that the Fiscal Responsibility Act was only a first step in curbing our nation’s unsustainable debt trajectory and the right next step is to form a bipartisan commission to begin to educate the American people about our nation’s poor fiscal health.
Surely there will be those who voice skepticism in forming a commission, questioning the need for another governmental body when committees are already in place. Yet establishing a bipartisan commission to raise public awareness and concern about the severity of our budget challenges is the best and most realistic mechanism to make needed progress in the future. Moreover, until we have a bipartisan consensus on how to address entitlements, politicians will continue to use Social Security and Medicare as a political weapon.
Whatever its composition, public or private, an effective commission must have members with the stature and voice to explain to the American people in a transparent, bipartisan, and honest way the dangers of increasing debt, the rising cost of servicing that debt and its harm to our economy. Only when the public truly understands the problem, presented in stark, unbiased terms, will they coalesce around solutions and move Congress to embrace responsible fiscal policies."