As a State Senator representing my hometown, my first obligation is my district; but I would be remiss to ignore the national issues that affect my district and our state.
For instance last month, elected officials let an avoidable crisis again distract us from the country’s real problems. The result: a government shutdown that restricted revenues from many of the contractors and business in our state. While we may have reopened the government and avoided default, the continued showmanship in Congress and inability to compromise is diverting attention from our most pressing matters — our budget and associated debt — and putting in place haphazard policies like sequestration.
Fortunately, national legislators now have a small window of opportunity to make last month’s fiasco a distant memory. With the creation of a formal budget conference — led in the Senate side by our own Patty Murray — leaders have a unique chance to reconcile the House and Senate budgets and provide recommendations on how to fund the government for 2014.
But urgency is of the utmost importance.
When Senator Murray said at the conference’s first meeting that she is “ready to make tough concessions,” she must mean it. And when the House’s budget leader, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) says “we must focus on common ground,” well, his actions need to speak louder than his words.
Considering the need for long-term certainty and reducing the national debt, I would expect the committee prioritize both. Because despite claims of short-term deficit improvements, the national debt is the largest it has been since the immediate aftermath of World War II and associated interest payments remain a significant portion of the budget. Folks here in Washington need policymakers in the other Washington to confront our debt burden head on before further damage is done.
As the Campaign to Fix the Debt — a bipartisan group founded by the hardly-radical Erskine Bowles that I work with — has recently said, “Congress must stop the madness, start bipartisan discussions in earnest, and solve our debt problems once and for all.”
Based on Sen. Murray’s track record in leadership and fiscal responsibility, I am confident she will help guide these discussions in a productive and helpful direction.
The road ahead is no doubt daunting. At a minimum the conference should replace temporary sequester cuts with smarter, more permanent savings — something Sen. Murray has pushed adamantly. Sequestration represents poor short-and long-term economic policy and costs Washington state thousands of valuable jobs.
But if possible, budget conferees should offer formal recommendations on tax and entitlement reform. Americans need programs like Medicare to be solvent, but preservation requires reform, and now is again a chance to address this.
These are attainable goals, but they key to require tough choices, bold leadership and principled compromise — something I am confident they can do based on what I see every day here in our own state capital.
I stand ready to support Sen. Murray as she works with the conference to solve these problems. Washington needs the economic lift that would result from a large-scale deal and I call on all budget conferees to lead the way in returning our nation to one of excellence.
State Sen. Steve Hobbs (D-44) is a co-chair of the Washington Chapter of the Campaign to Fix the Debt.
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