William Hoagland: It’s time for both parties to own the debt — and then address it

G. William Hoagland is senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a member of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He previously held senior staff positions with the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and the Office of the Republican Majority Leader. He recently wrote an opinion piece for The Hill, an excerpt of which is below.

The first law of economics is that scarcity is real. The first law of politics is to ignore the first law of economics. The problem is, as politics continues to eclipse economics, federal debt continues to rise — and, over the long term, ever-rising debt will weaken the economy, limit living standards, and threaten U.S. global leadership.

With the White House and Congress needing to raise the debt limit in the coming months, the time has come for both Republicans and Democrats to set aside the politics, take joint ownership of our $31.4 trillion debt and draft a long-term plan of spending cuts and tax increases to begin to restore sanity to our federal finances.

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.