MY VIEW: Maya MacGuineas October 18 2013

The shutdown may be over and fears of a default adverted for now, but the reality remains that we still haven't made any progress on our debt problem. CRFB President Maya MacGuineas writes in zpolitics that with a few months before we approach the next fiscal hurdles, lawmakers should get busy and begin to work toward a permanent solution.

As we finally emerge from what was simply the most recent in a long series of short-term fiscal crises, it is abundantly clear what our leaders in Washington should do to prevent themselves from governing on the edge of a cliff in the future: they must stop the madness of shutdowns and showdowns, start earnest bipartisan negotiations and solve the problem of our unsustainable national debt once and for all.

The just-concluded fiscal near-disaster proves that short-sighted political gamesmanship produces very few winners, and a whole bunch of losers. Worse still, such crises divert attention from the real issues that are driving our debt over the long term – namely our outdated tax code and our ever-more-costly entitlement programs.

If lawmakers needed any more reason to work for the problem, the voters clearly view solving the debt problem as our most important priority:

Moreover, Americans understand that the national debt is problematic. In a recent poll we commissioned with prominent Democratic and Republican pollsters, a plurality of respondents said that the debt was the single most pressing issue Washington must tackle – more than jobs, immigration reform or health care.

We need to take advantage of this opportunity, especially with the conference committee beginning to negotiate. If we do not, we can we expect more of the crisis to crisis approach that has plagued us so much in the past. Write MacGuineas:

The time for our elected leaders to be worrying about short-term political gains has long since passed – if it ever existed at all. Now, they must use this latest opportunity to stop all of the fruitless chicanery, start honest negotiations and solve our fiscal problems – before they get even worse than they were last week.

Click here to read the full article.

"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.