Senators Start ‘In The Middle’ With Deficit Talks : NPR
Looks like some deficit hawks in the President’s own party will try to open dialogue, but will Republicans participating be tarred and feathered by tea party types [and need I really ask that question?]
President Obama has promised to start a conversation on reducing the deficit as soon as the new Congress is sworn in this week. It won’t be an easy discussion, but Obama does have some allies in the U.S. Senate.
There’s a small, bipartisan group of senators who insist they’re ready to make the “difficult choices” Obama has said need to be made to tackle the deficit.
Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner sees trillion-dollar deficits as a ticking time bomb. Better to defuse them voluntarily, he says, than risk an explosion as government creditors get nervous.
“It’s not a question of if we’re going to address this issue. It’s a question of when. And I think our sense was, we ought to try to do this on our timelines and not have it dictated by the financial markets,” he says.