USA TODAY: WASHINGTON — Erskine Bowles realized how tough his task will be leading President Obama's war on the federal budget deficit when he told his 90-year-old mother of his appointment.
She was proud of him. Then she said, "Don't mess with my Medicare."
It won't be the last threat Bowles gets this year as he directs an 18-member, bipartisan commission through an ocean of red ink that has never been deeper or more foreboding.
Under Obama's budget plan, the USA's debt in 2020 would be nearly the size of the entire economy then. Interest costs would be $900 billion, five times today's level.
The White House, Congress, budget experts and typical Americans are growing anxious about the nation's mounting debt, which is helping to fuel the rise of the anti-tax, anti-big government Tea Party movement.
Yet the only solutions capable of raising enough money are politically dangerous for the president and Congress: tax increases and major reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to take the first step.
The debt hasn't stopped conservatives from saying tax increases should be off the table when the panel debates how to close Washington's budget gap — an estimated $1.5 trillion this year alone, equal to the entire federal budget in 1995. Nor has it stopped liberals from saying Medicare, Social Security and other entitlements must be protected.
Bowles, outgoing president of the University of North Carolina and a White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, says neither taxes nor benefits can be off-limits.
"We can't do this without a lot of pain," he says. Nation's soaring deficit calls for painful choices >>> Richard Wolf, USA Today | Tuesday, April 13, 2010
