Mike Murphy: A bipartisan fiscal commission could help lawmakers address our looming debt issues

Mike Murphy is senior vice president and chief of staff at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He recently wrote an opinion piece for The Hill, an excerpt of which is below.

One year from now, to borrow a phrase from Gerald Ford, our long national nightmare will be over — or at least it will be for about half of the country pending the outcome in November. Someone will have just been inaugurated president, and a new Congress will be settling in, with a good likelihood of divided government remaining. 

Given our deeply polarized and dysfunctional political system, which will only have been exacerbated, expectations for enacting anyone’s legislative agenda in 2025 should be kept in check, to say the least. Instead, governing by self-imposed crisis will remain the norm. And like it or not, several action-forcing fiscal deadlines on tap for 2025 will dominate the legislative agenda, including the need to lift the debt ceiling again as well as confront the scheduled expiration of the 2017 tax cuts and discretionary spending caps put in place as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

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.