A nonpartisan group is working to find solutions to the nation’s fiscal crisis. Josh Gordon is Policy Director for the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, bringing its ‘Fiscal Solutions Tour’ to UW Milwaukee. “We’re going around the country with diverse experts, really to explain to Americans kind of the parameters that we’re talking about . . . to solve the nation’s long term fiscal challenge,” Gordon explains. Politicians may like to talk about “tough decisions” but Gordon says “the key is that for long term sustainability, we’re going to need to cut spending and we’re going to need to raise taxes, some combination of those things. And it’s not enough just to say you’re in favor of cutting spending, you really need to specify what spending you’re going to cut, and that’s the tough decision.”
There’s not a lot of specificity during this campaign season, and Gordon says the goal of the Concord Coalition is to educate the public and convince politicians to honestly and openly address the problem. “Then let the voters decide, which of the selection of hard choices they’re willing to make for the long term good of the country and for future generations.”
The panel includes Representative Paul Ryan, the Jansville Republican whose ‘Roadmap for America’ has laid out an explicitly conservative set of proposals to attack the nation’s deficit. “The idea that Concord has when we do this Fiscal Solutions Tour is that we want both the conservative and the liberal perspectives of the way out of these problems,” says Gordon. The forum originates from the campus of UW Milwaukee and will be broadcast live to the UW campuses in Green Bay, La Crosse, Oshkosh and Wausau, as well as on the web.