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Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
Sen.
Rob Portman stays optimistic on
debt deal but says it’s ‘just a first step’
By Stephen Koff
October 23, 2011
WASHINGTON
-- The papers say it’s bad.
With a Thanksgiving deadline fast approaching, the congressional
“supercommittee”
devoted to deficit reduction “is running in rhetorical circles,” unable
to
break an impasse over taxes, says today’s Washington Post.
The
New York Times says the 12
lawmakers “have not agreed on basic elements like a benchmark against
which
savings will be measured.”
And
if it the committee fails to find
at least $1.2 trillion in savings, on top of $900 billion in deficit
reduction
already agreed to by Congress, all manner of financial and
congressional mayhem
could ensue, because there’s talk of lawmakers saying no to automatic cuts that would kick in
for defense and
entitlement spending. More market crises, credit-rating downgrades,
hand-wringing...
It
seems a bit breathless, which
happens when the people doing the work won’t talk about it publicly.
Tongues
have a habit of wagging anonymously. So while on a press conference
call on
various other matters, we asked U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio
Republican who
is on the committee, to shed some light.
Portman,
who said he is working on
debt committee matters “every day, pretty much every evening, every
morning,”
would not discuss specifics. He said it is “hard enough to try to come
together
and try to make some of these hard decisions without having leaks from
the
process.” The issue is “very sensitive and I think it needs to be
confidential,” he said.
“But
I will say that I’m still hopeful
that we can come together with an agreement that meets the goals.” That
said,
an agreement this year would be “just a first step.”
“We’re
going to need to take even
further steps down the line, because the debt continues to grow over
the next
several years at unsustainable rates,” he said. Depending on the
baseline used,
the debt is projected to grow between $3 trillion and $15 trillion over
the coming
decade, he said.
“So
even if we were to reach our
objective” of $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, “it
wouldn’t
even be reducing the debt equal to the increase in the debt likely to
occur in
the next ten years. So I am absolutely committed to getting to a
result. I
remain hopeful and am working very hard at it.”
Read
this and other articles at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
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