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Executive Director Carolyn Bourdeaux joined Soledad O’Brien on Matter of Fact for an engaging discussion on the national debt, fiscal responsibility, current strategies, and potential solutions. Bourdeaux discussed the consequences of rising deficits, evaluated recent federal spending cuts, and emphasized that we must find a path toward sustainable, bipartisan reform.
Transcript
Soledad O’Brien: The national debt is massive, $36 trillion and growing. Since taking office, the Trump administration has made sweeping cuts to government agencies, which it says are an effort to reduce federal spending, but many of those cuts have been met with legal challenges and are causing confusion. Carolyn Bordeaux, former Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia, is the executive director of the Concord Coalition. It’s a nonpartisan organization devoted to educating people about the national debt and advocating for greater fiscal responsibility. It’s so nice to have you in studio. Thank you for joining me.
Carolyn Bourdeaux: Good to be here.
Soledad O’Brien: There’s a bit of a philosophy that goes something like this. We’ve had debt forever, so it’s not so bad. You disagree.
Carolyn Bourdeaux: What’s happening is it’s getting out of control. We have about 7 trillion a year in spending, and we bring in about 5 trillion in revenues. So that gap, which is 30% of our spending, is basically being financed on our national credit card. We are now spending more on interest, more on financing this debt, than we spend on our national defense, and it means we can’t invest in things that are very important for our future, right? It’s starting to put pressure on our domestic priorities, and it also sucks money out of the private sector.
Soledad O’Brien: Who are we making the interest payments to?
Carolyn Bourdeaux: Everybody. We all hold these securities, our treasuries. They are widely considered to be one of the most secure investments that you can make. Other countries around the world hold our debt, allowing us, though, to spend far more than we bring in.
Soledad O’Brien: The Trump administration, kind of led by Elon Musk, right, has been doing all of these dramatic cuts. I’m curious if you think that strategy is a good strategy.
Carolyn Bourdeaux: So, I went into DOGE with so much hope that this would be a serious effort to really try to evaluate the federal budget to find places where there was fraud abuse, places where we could be more efficient, right? But the way that this has happened, which has been without any congressional oversight, without any deliberative process, has ended up making it extremely chaotic. But further when you look at the savings that they are claiming, it is minuscule relative to the overall challenge that we face as a country, and in fact, we may be on the negative side because of some of the cuts that he’s made.
Soledad O’Brien: So, then what’s the answer?
Carolyn Bourdeaux: We do have a lot of spending growth, but that is really because our population is aging, and because of the growth in health care expenses. If you just take Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, add it to the interest on the debt, you’re well over 50% of the federal budget right there.
Soledad O’Brien: You know this, because you’re a politician. You’re going to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid – that is a political minefield, and also really probably derail a lot of human beings as well.
Carolyn Bourdeaux: Right. One of the things people have to realize right is there are solutions to Medicare, to Social Security that are not about gutting the programs but are about making reasonable changes to them to try to improve the solvency of those programs.
Soledad O’Brien: So then in your mind, what do those cuts look like?
Carolyn Bourdeaux: If we perhaps increase some of the Social Security revenues on wealthier people. If we maybe change benefits for people who may not need as much. Should we raise the retirement age, maybe by a month, maybe by a couple of months? But if we do a lot of these small things, we can solve this problem. Look around us. We are a very wealthy country. We have the resources to solve it, but we have to have an honest discussion first.
Soledad O’Brien: Do you think realistically that the Concord Coalition is going to be able to bring elected officials together who have a vested interest in keeping the people who vote for them happy and actually doing something about this problem?
Carolyn Bourdeaux: I know people have lost faith that our national government can actually address this issue. I was director of Georgia’s Senate budget and evaluation office during the Great Recession, and during that period, Georgia had to fill a 20% hole in their budget, and they ended up passing budgets that made cuts, that raised revenues, and they passed by broad and bipartisan majorities. Pretty much every state in this country does that every single year. If they can do that, our national government can do it too.
