Home » Wall Street Journal: CEOs call for federal deficit action

Wall Street Journal: CEOs call for federal deficit action

WASHINGTON (Oct. 25, 2012) — Chief executives of more than 80 major U.S. corporations are banding together to pressure Congress to reduce the federal deficit with tax-revenue increases as well as spending cuts, according to a story in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal written by David Wessel.

In a statement to be released today, the CEOs say any fiscal plan “that can succeed both financially and politically” has to limit the growth of health-care spending, make Social Security solvent and “include comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform, which broadens the base, lowers rates, raises revenues and reduces the deficit,” the Journal reports.

Regardless of which party wins the White House in November, the CEOs who signed the manifesto say tax increases are inevitable.

“There is no possible way; you can do the arithmetic a million different ways” to avoid raising taxes, said Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, the Wall Street Journal says. “You can’t tax your way to fix this problem, and you can’t cut entitlements enough to fix this problem.”

The statement was organized by the Fix the Debt campaign, a bipartisan effort inspired by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, who chaired a 2010 deficit panel appointed by President Obama and have been crisscrossing the country sounding fiscal alarms.

To read the entire story on the Fix the Debt website, click here.