Congress and the President should work together to build a better debt limit, something which The Concord Coalition reiterated in an op-ed last week on The Hill’s Congress Blog.
Ben Ritz, Concord’s legislative outreach director, argues in the blog that the push by some lawmakers to repeal the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) and the Budget Control Act’s sequester-level caps without offsets shows that “today’s leaders seem increasingly content to blow through these circuit breakers without bothering to limit the budgetary damage.”
He emphasized that budget projections still assume that savings from the sequester will materialize:
“Projected deficits, already on an unsustainable trajectory, will rise even further if lawmakers continue to use the impracticality of current law as the justification for ignoring savings targets. If current budget control mechanisms no longer have credibility, they need to be replaced with something that does.”
Ritz discusses several ways the debt limit could be improved, including linking it to a more meaningful economic indicator such as GDP and better incorporating it into the annual budget process.
External links:
Federal Debt and the Statutory Limit (CBO)
