Congress Knows It Has a Spending Problem, But Won't Fix It

Congress Knows It Has a Spending Problem, But Won't Fix It

At a recent Senate hearing on the fiscal outlook, legislators and budget experts said the quiet part out loud: the United States is running historically large deficits in non-crisis times, and we need to stop pretending that we can grow our way out of it. Washington’s problem isn’t ignorance. It’s that the only politically safe position is to acknowledge the debt crisis — and then do nothing to fix it. Congress lacks an effective mechanism to ma…