Maya MacGuineas: No budget. On the brink of default. It's a hell of a way to run a country.

Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. She recently wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post, an excerpt of which is below.

Congress is heading into another risky debt-ceiling showdown — a situation that a decade ago was unimaginable and has now become dishearteningly routine. At the same time, the federal debt as a share of the economy is the highest it has ever been other than just after World War II. Yet our political leaders are busy swinging back and forth between doing nothing about the debt and making it worse.

Last year, for the first time in more than 40 years, neither the Senate nor House bothered to vote on a budget — one of the most fundamental responsibilities of a government. This year, three months after the deadline, the House Budget Committee still hasn’t released a budget plan for next year; thus a budget-less 2020 is likely as well. So our plan is to borrow a jaw-dropping roughly $900 billion in each of those years — much of it from foreign countries — without a strategy or even an acknowledgment of the choices being made because no one wants to be held accountable.

It’s a hell of a way to run a country.

Read the entire piece here.

"My Views" are works published by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, but they do not necessarily reflect the views of all members or staff of the Committee.