Potential presidents can’t hide from deficit

Balancing the budget requires facing facts

Presidential candidates are crisscrossing the USA making the case for their party’s nomination for president. Candidates will separate themselves from the pack only by, to borrow Adlai Stevenson’s line, talking sense.

It is only by spurring a discussion about our dire fiscal situation that whoever wins will be able to take action once in the White House. Voters are looking for a candidate who approaches the debt as a problem solver, not a doctrinaire office seeker.

Even so, political consultants in both parties are advising their candidates to steer clear. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was first to ignore that advice. In his widely covered speech in New Hampshire, Christie went heavy on realism. He offered proposals that would strengthen Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

The heavy news coverage for a yet- to- announce presidential candidate proved the value of talking to voters as adults. Social Security is on a path to insolvency in less than two decades, and action must be taken now to save it.

There is time for other candidates to join this national conversation, but is there the fortitude? Not long after Christie’s speech, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S. C., publicly embraced the SimpsonBowles budget plan as part of his reform efforts, saying that any debt solution will require a bipartisan approach and that everything should be on the table. While Graham did not spell out the details, our political discourse needs more truth- tellers.

Entitlement reform already is taking hits from the right and the left. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a Republican, ruled out any changes to Social Security, while Sen. Bernie Sanders, I- Vt., proposes expanding entitlements. Both proposals are detached from reality.

The next president faces a daunting fiscal situation. If he or she serves two terms, the next president will see debt held by the public grow from $ 14.4 trillion in 2017 to approximately $ 21.2 trillion in 2025. Without change, by 2030, every dollar of revenue we collect will go to interest on the debt and mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare, starving such public investments as infrastructure, education and scientific research.

No amount of taxation of the wealthy can solve all our fiscal problems. There is not enough waste, fraud and foreign aid to put our entitlement programs on a sustainable path. We cannot rely on economic growth to singlehandedly get out of trouble.

Our debt problems are so large that they require tax reform to generate revenue and spending reform to slow the growth of entitlement programs. We can make tough but modest changes today that gradually go into effect to improve the fiscal situation for current and future generations.

Presidential candidates are responsible for putting forward serious policy proposals that till the ground in Washington for a bipartisan solution. We can’t accept anything less.

Judd Gregg, New Hampshire’s former Republican senator, and Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s former Democratic governor, co- chair the Campaign to Fix the Debt.