One Woman’s War on Debt Gains Steam After Years in the Making

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Monday, December 24, 2012

One Woman’s War on Debt Gains Steam After Years in the Making

By ANNIE LOWREY

WASHINGTON — Maya MacGuineas has been ringing alarms about the nation’s growing debt for 15 years, imagining a day when a president and a Congress might finally work together to curb deficit spending. After watching President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner once again come close to agreeing on a plan, only to see a deal slip away, she is troubled but undeterred.

“It’s so bad out there that there’s a question as to whether Washington can govern anymore,” Ms. MacGuineas said, sitting in the Capitol after briefing a group of legislators. “We want a deal to happen, and want it to happen in a bipartisan way, because otherwise it’s not going to stick.”

Ms. MacGuineas, a budget expert who has advised Republican and Democratic lawmakers, is the face of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a nonpartisan phalanx of chief executives, politicians and economic experts with $43 million to spend on efforts to pressure lawmakers to broker a deal.

A wisecracking, self-deprecating, third-generation Washingtonian, Ms. MacGuineas has spent years issuing forceful warnings about threats to the solvency of Social Security and to the pristine bond rating of American debt, often using Washington dinner parties as her soap box.

“For some reason, in Washington, you can’t talk about the budget except over food,” quipped Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution, who is a part of the Fix the Debt campaign.

Ms. MacGuineas has worked in politics, advising Senator John McCain of Arizona on Social Security during his 2000 campaign for the presidency. But she describes herself as a political independent and has spent most of her career at Washington’s nonpartisan research houses, including Brookings, the New America Foundation and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“For the longest time, nobody cared, nobody listened,” she said. “It was 15 years of irrelevancy.”

Two years ago, things changed. With the country adding more than a trillion dollars a year to its debt, more members of Congress became interested in budget data and advice, Ms. MacGuineas said. Corporate leaders and the American public also began tuning in to the looming debt problem.

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