Ron Kind: “I fear that if we make it impossible by not reducing national debt, by not shoring up the Social Security and Medicare…”

“I fear that if we make it impossible by not reducing national debt, by not shoring up the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, it is going to be impossible for that next generation to meet those obligations and we will see a fiscal crisis never before witnessed in this Nation. It is almost deja vu all over again as far as economic policy. We have seen this. It is really the repeat of Reaganomics back in the early 1980s where they ushered through this huge tax cut but also simultaneously tried paying for a huge increase in defense spending which led to year after year, a whole decade's worth of deficit financing which left us in a position of dealing with a $5.7 trillion national debt. The difference between that then and what we are facing today is back then the country could afford to make that mistake, because we had time to recover. We do not have that luxury anymore. We have this aging population staring us in the face. They are going to start retiring in the next decade.”