When you run for president, don’t run from the debt.
That’s the message to 2016 presidential candidates that is highlighted in a recent guest column in the Des Moines Register by Robert L. Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, and Maya MacGuineas, head of Campaign to Fix the Debt.
Voters can expect to hear big campaign promises about everything from encouraging economic growth to preserving Social Security to promoting national security.
When you run for president, don’t run from the debt.
That’s the message to 2016 presidential candidates that is highlighted in a recent guest column in the Des Moines Register by Robert L. Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, and Maya MacGuineas, head of Campaign to Fix the Debt.
Voters can expect to hear big campaign promises about everything from encouraging economic growth to preserving Social Security to promoting national security.
“Yet none of these promises will be credible if — as so often in the past — the candidates neglect to say how they will pay for them,” Bixby and MacGuineas write. They urge candidates to make sure their budget proposals add up:
“It would be a good reality check for the voters and candidates alike. It would also be a useful warm-up for the real thing: the next president’s first budget submission to Congress, due within weeks of taking office.”
The op-ed ran in conjunction with the launch of the “First Budget” initiative in Iowa and New Hampshire to focus attention in the presidential race on the nation’s fiscal challenges. (See related story on First Budget above.)
With the federal debt already higher as a share of our economy than at any time since the World War II era, Bixby and MacGuineas say, the next president must have “a mandate to act.”
