With billions of dollars in defense and domestic spending cuts set to kick in March 1, Rep. Jim Himes said he fears the odds are slim for an 11th-hour deal that would postpone or offset the sequester.
“It looks like we will go into the period of sequestration, which is going to create some real problems for a lot of people,” Himes, a Greenwich Democrat, told the Business Journal. “It outrages and embarrasses me that that’s where we are, but it does seem to require a crisis to get action here in Washington these days.”
Himes said the onus is now on congressional leaders from both parties “to just close themselves in a room and get a deal done.”
Since arriving in Congress, Himes has campaigned for the deficit reduction plan spearheaded by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who headed up President Barack Obama’s bipartisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
While the plan drafted by Simpson and Bowles was never approved by the commission, the two recently published a new proposal that calls for $2.4 trillion of deficit reduction measures over the next decade in the form of tax and entitlement reforms and spending cuts.
“What’s particularly frustrating is that the world knows, more or less, what the deal looks like,” Himes said. “You can choose (Simpson-Bowles) or some variant thereof, but we know more or less what a deal looks like. People just need to summon the political courage to get it done.”
However, in a sign of possible Republican support for additional tax revenues, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Feb. 25 in an interview with CNN that he would support new revenues if Obama and Democrats support entitlement reforms.
“I’ll raise revenue. Will you reform entitlements,” Graham told CNN’s The Situation Room. “And both together, we’ll set aside sequestration in a way that won’t disrupt the economy and hurt the Defense Department.”
