How One Woman Made Budget Scolding Chic: Maya MacGuineas, Doyenne of Debt.
How One Woman Made Budget Scolding Chic: Maya MacGuineas, Doyenne of Debt.
IN SEPTEMBER of 2011, a fortyish budget connoisseur named Maya MacGuineas was feeling demoralized. She couldn’t believe that Congress and the president had nearly let the country default on its debt rather than reach a major deficit-cutting deal the previous summer. So she did what she had become unofficially famous for in the wonk circles of Washington: She threw a glamorous dinner party.
MacGuineas’s friend, Virginia Senator Mark Warner, agreed to open his Alexandria estate to a coterie of bold-faced names. There would be CEOs like Indra Nooyi of Pepsi and Larry Fink of BlackRock; politicians like Saxby Chambliss, the Republican senator from Georgia, and Steny Hoyer, the House’s second-ranking Democrat; and A-listerswithout-portfolio like Alan Greenspan and labor leader Andy Stern. MacGuineas had planned for a crowd of 20, but some 60 showed up in the end. It turned out they were feeling the same existential dread she was, a throbbing sense that the country was becoming ungovernable.
The evening didn’t start well. “The members of Congress were saying to the CEOs, ‘You guys need to get involved,’” MacGuineas recalls. “And the CEOs pushed back: ‘We’re desperately trying to run companies… Why don’t you guys do your job.’” But, after the initial finger-pointing, the dinner took on a confessional air. Stern, who had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission in 2010, announced that he regretted his vote against the now iconic deficit-cutting plan. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini gave an impassioned, extemporaneous speech about how it was up to everyone to work together. “This is never going to happen again. We’re getting in the game,” he said.