Concord Coalition's Fiscal Wake-up Call

Today (12/18/08), Robert Bixby, Executive Director of the Concord Coalition, displayed the fiscal situation faced by the United States in a presentation on the Coalition's Wake-up Tour ~ The U.S. Fiscal Outlook sponsored by the Vermont Business Roundtable. The situation is grim and is caused by policies that have been enacted in the past now aggravated by demographics as Baby Boomers enter retirement age and Medicare and Social Security costs escalate.

Mr. Bixby concluded with these points:

• Current fiscal policy is unsustainable.
• No easy solution will be found in preventing waste, fraud or abuse. We cannot grow our way out of the problem.
• Solutions will require bipartisan cooperation and a willingness to discuss all options.
• Public engagement and understanding is vital to finding solutions.
• This is not about numbers. It is a moral issue (i.e, the legacy we leave to future generations).

This is the same recipe that Vermont must embrace to find our way out of the unsustainable fiscal morass created in the past decade.