What has a chance of going somewhere if the president and the Congress can get back together is some version of a grand bargain, and a grand bargain means we have to slow the growth of the entitlements, especially Medicare and Medicaid. We have to put Social Security back on a firm foundation. And we have to reform our tax code so it raises some more revenue. We need to do that and stop fooling around with this counterproductive thing called the sequester, which is bad macro policy, it would reduce employment when we don't want to.
February 23, 2013, Alice M. Rivlin,
CNN