President Obama created a bipartisan debt reduction committee in 2010 to figure out a way to fix Washington’s busted budgets. What came out of it was the Simpson-Bowles plan, named after its co-chairs. That plan was sure talked about a lot, but pretty much ignored over the past year and a half that Congress could’ve done something with it.
Suffice to say, Simpson and Bowles aren’t very happy with Congress’ alternate New Year’s solution. From a press release [PDF] they issued today…
Washington missed this magic moment to do something big to reduce the deficit, reform our tax code, and fix our entitlement programs. We have all known for over a year that this fiscal cliff was coming. In fact Washington politicians set it up to force themselves to seriously deal with our Nation’s long term fiscal problems.
And then they didn’t. Simpson and Bowles call what Congress passed “a small step” after bringing the country to “the brink of disaster,” and says they need to step out of their comfort zones and find the courage to fix the tax code and government aid programs.
If they don’t, we’re going to see variations of the fiscal cliff playing out over and over again, like that movie Groundhog Day.
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