MY VIEW: Judd Gregg June 25 2012

In an op-ed in The Hill, former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) urged Congress to begin to take action on the budget before the election. He says that rather than trying to fix all of our fiscal problems immediately, they could tackle one aspect while leaving broader solutions until after the election. He explains:

[Congress] should not try and pass a comprehensive bill addressing all the causes of our impending fiscal meltdown.  

Such expansive and substantive action is beyond Congress’s capacity, especially with the summer recess looming and the need to campaign this fall.  

Similar to TARP, Congress should pick one issue that is a driver of our fiscal problems and can be addressed with a focused, single-purpose bill and fix it.

Social Security comes to mind. 

It is a program with dramatic structural problems due to the retirement of the baby boom generation.  

It is a critical program. It is broken. And it is fixable.  

The president and Congress would not need to do heavy policy work. They could simply adopt the bipartisan proposal of Simpson-Bowles on Social Security, which made it sound for at least 50 years, without significantly affecting present beneficiaries.

Click here to read the full op-ed.

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