David Walker: “We need civil service reform. You need budget reform.”

they should be focused on making sure that we get our structural deficits under control and our debt-to-GDP down to reasonable and sustainable levels.

This is not a collective bargaining problem. I mean, people ought to have the right to bargain, and we're not proposing to touch that at all.

The president has got the high ground because he's basically saying, let's go for a long-term deal. I will put Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security on the table. All you need to do is to put tax expenditures on the table.

Anybody on the left who signs a pledge that says, I won't reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, they're part of the problem. They're not part of the solution.