Protect Americans while reducing debt
In the month of our nation’s founding, we’d do well to remember how we’ve kept united, free and strong for 235 years. Self-government seems simple in concept, but not always in practice. It calls for compromise while not compromising our core principles and values.
These are important lessons to keep in mind as we face twin challenges to our collective well-being: questions about raising our nation’s debt ceiling and reducing our federal deficit. The former cannot wait for the latter. We must increase the debt limit now in order to pay basic bills we’ve already incurred, avoiding a calamitous default on our obligations.
We must support — rather than undermine — efforts to create and sustain jobs as well as strengthen our overall economic recovery. Thus, we call upon the president and Congress to craft and pursue a deficit-reduction plan that:
Ÿ Avoids innocuous-sounding but potentially catastrophic new budget procedures and structural program changes. In the short term, these changes would force drastic cuts in such vital priorities as Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and SNAP; over time, they’d dismantle basic services entirely.
Ÿ Takes a balanced approach that includes revenues, as well as carefully determined spending restraints and budget cuts. We can avoid a “budget cuts only” approach — decimating critical services for families in need — by turning to help from such revenue sources as tax breaks for powerful corporations and the very wealthiest people.
Ÿ Protects low-income Americans from harm. Exempting low-income people from cuts has been a tenet of every major deficit-reduction agreement of the past 25 years.
A balanced, responsible approach to deficit reduction can help restore our nation to fiscal health and stability, without compromising either the basic protections on which we all rely or the values and principles we hold most dear.
Kathy Ryg
President
Voices for Illinois Children
John Bouman
President
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law