Former UNC-system President Erskine Bowles continued to call for a bipartisan push to reduce the $16-trillion national deficit during a speech at Wake Forest University Tuesday.
Bowles, who led the system from 2006 to 2010 and served as former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, partnered with former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson to present “The American Debt and Deficit Crisis: Issues and Solutions.”
The program, which filled the 2,250-seat Wait Chapel on Wake Forest’s campus, is part of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a national effort led by Bowles and Simpson.
Bowles and Simpson have worked as a team since 2010, when President Barack Obama asked them to chair the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
The one-year commission sought to reduce the national debt by $4 trillion in a decade.
Although the commission’s work featured equal support from Republican and Democratic members, many of its recommendations were not passed in Congress’s final budget in 2011.
Gradual but effective deficit reduction is essential, Bowles told the audience. He outlined the ideas behind the Simpson-Bowles Plan, which includes cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense spending, as well as tax code reforms.
“We need to reduce the size of the government down to what it was during the Bill Clinton administration,” he said.
Bowles noted that all of the money spent in the past year on infrastructure, education and research in the U.S. was borrowed, mostly from foreign countries.
