Ex-legislators join debt-reduction group

— As lawmakers struggle to reach an agreement on the federal budget, they got some advice Monday from a group of their former peers, including former Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.

Fix the Debt, a coalition of businesses and policy experts, announced the creation of its Congressional Fiscal Leadership Council, a bipartisan group of 13 former senators and representatives that will help Fix the Debt with its goal of slowing the growth of the national debt.

Lincoln said the group has no stated slate of policy proposals. She said spending reductions on so-called entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, cuts in discretionary spending and tax increases must all be “on the table” to reduce the nation’s debt load, which currently sits at about $11.1 trillion.

Lincoln, who was defeated in 2010 by Republican John Boozman, said she hoped the group’s bipartisan membership would serve as an example to current congressmen, who have been engaged in a hotly partisan debate over taxes and spending.

“We’ve got to come up with the will and the camaraderie to take the steps, one-by-one, that will allow us over the next 10 years to put our financial house in order,” Lincoln said.

Republican Jim Nussle - a former Ohio congressman, House Budget Committee chairman and director of the Office of Management and Budget - said the group wasn’t just a bunch of “has beens.”

“We are current citizens who don’t want to be democratic bystanders on our country’s road to ruin,” he said.

Not everyone agrees with that assessment.

The former members already had a chance to deal with the debt and they failed to do so, said Sarah Anderson, global economy director at the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal research and advocacy group in Washington.

“These are people who weren’t solving the problem when they were in a position to do so,” she said. “Why should we see them as legitimate voices at this time?”

In addition to the former legislators, executives at about 150 U.S. corporations have joined the campaign to form the group's CEO Fiscal Leadership Council.

According to Fix the Debt’s website, the campaign plans to spend $60 million this year on advertising and promotions to get its point across.

Critics, including Anderson, slammed the group for pushing for lower taxes on foreign corporate earnings, while at the same time pushing for spending cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

“They have a great deal of self-interest in the agenda they’re pushing,” Anderson said. “They stand to make huge windfalls,” of cash.

Fix the Debt said the national debt equals about 70 percent of the gross domestic product - the sum of the value of the nation's goods and services produced in one year - and is on track to exceed 100 percent of the GDP over the next decade and 200 percent by 2040.

The group said the rising debt, which was largely caused by spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,growing health care and retirement costs, tax cuts and the broader economic slowdown of the past several years, would lead to an economic crisis if left unchecked.

“The debt is going to take off like a scalded cat,” said one of the council members, former Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who chaired the Senate Budget Committee until he retired last year.

Members of the group said they were not pushing a formal agenda and had not come to an agreement on exactly what it will take to reduce the debt. But they did agree that the nation's increasing debt will hamper economic growth.

Lincoln is a special-policy adviser at Alston + Bird, a Washington law and policy consulting firm. In January, two years after leaving office,Lincoln became eligible to serve as a lobbyist. (Law requires a two-year “cooling off” period for those making the transition from lawmaker to lobbyist.) Lincoln said Monday she does not have plans to formally lobby current members of Congress.

In the two years since she left Capitol Hill, lawmakers and President Barack Obama have been unable to come to a broad debt-reduction agreement, instead making relatively small changes in taxes and spending.

Lincoln said that as a former legislator, she was not “peering down” at the current Congress in judgment at its inability to come to an agreement.

“There's no easy solution to these problems,” she said. “We want to bring ideas from our past and what it has taught us.”

Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/12/2013

Upcoming Events