I believe the risk to Medicare and Social Security recipients is a failure to act in a timely way to deal with the long-term debt trajectory that virtually every expert that has come before this Committee says is unsustainable.

My calculus tells me that me that this year we will hit gross debt to GDP of just over 90 percent.

We can't have a circumstance in which dollars, precious dollars that are being allocated for the nation's defense are wasted.

I don't see the pivot.

It is really hard to find something, I think, that works better than these Build America Bonds.

Nobody believes that that is sustainable.

If you take on too much debt, it affects the rate of economic growth in a country adversely.

I believe we were perilously close to that.

In the longer term, we have got to pivot and we have got to deal with this debt threat.

That will fundamentally threaten the economic security of the country going forward.

I think we have to be very careful not to prematurely reduce the deficit because, in many ways, we are facing what the Japanese did.

We hope to support the efforts of an official commission, whether statutory or created by Executive order.