Maya MacGuineas and Rob Portman: It's time for urgency and hard choices as US debt soars

Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Rob Portman is a former Senator from Ohio. They recently wrote an opinion piece for the Cincinnati Enquirer, an excerpt of which is below.

The Portman Center for Policy Solutions at the University of Cincinnati promotes finding common ground to solve tough policy problems. Among the many topics that have been addressed since its founding over the past few years are affordable housing, cybersecurity, AI regulation, infrastructure, and the electoral system. All of these issues are important and challenging, but none is more significant to our future or more politically charged than the topic of this year’s Portman Center Symposium − the debt and deficit.

The Symposium was able to attract some of the nation’s top subject matter experts, and both of us served as moderators on panels that focused not just on the obvious problem we face, but also on the perennial and thorny question of how to mobilize the public to secure our fiscal future. America’s growing annual deficits and unprecedented national debt present a monumental challenge that requires civic engagement and public discourse to get it under control before it is too late.

Read the entire piece here.

Published works by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget do not necessarily reflect the views of all members or staff of the Committee.