 The mounting national debt is a tremendous threat to the future of the United States, its position on the world, our standard of living at home, and potentially our domestic tranquility. The national debt at this point is probably the most serious challenge facing the country today. After a terrorist potentially using a weapon of mass destruction in the United States, the biggest threat we have is our fiscal situation. The deficit and the debt are not an immediate problem, but they absolutely are a long run problem. If you look at the long run budget projections coming out of the Congressional Budget Office, those are truly terrifying. Mounting national debt is an enormous threat. It calls into credibility the full faith and credit of the United States, and that means that we are looked at almost by the rest of the world as a third world country. We can't do that. Well, countries decline either because they lose wars or they get buried under their own debt. The consequences of failure to deal with it are literally catastrophic. Mathematically, the debt's a bigger threat to future budgets and all our other national priorities. It's a bigger threat to the health of our economy than most people have recognized or been told yet. Clearly, if we allow the debt and deficits to continue as they are, they will crowd out almost all of their spending in terms of our payment of interest on our debt. It's not an acceptable alternative for our country, and certainly not an acceptable alternative for our children and grandchildren. My good colleague, Erskine Bowles, calls it the most serious threat that this country has ever had, the largest and most difficult thing to resolve, and the most predictable as to where we're headed. I don't think you can overstate the importance of this threat to the U.S. It is a threat to literally the foundations of our economy. They could crowd out future investments in skills, technologies, and the equipment we need to produce, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have identified it as our greatest national security threat. There is nothing I can think of that would give the country, both business and consumers, more confidence than to see a longer-term plan of reform that restores fiscal sustainability. I think it's a threat in a much larger sense. It's a threat to the whole idea of self-government. It's a threat to the notion that free people acting freely together can discipline themselves, put the future before the present, their children's interests ahead of their own. This debt issue is not a singular issue of concern just to our country, but to people who look to America for leadership. We ought to do this for the world. You have to think that the debt is our single biggest problem. We have a very large long-term deficit problem. We just simply have to fix it. There is no option. We have to reduce the future debt. Sixty people, both former people in business and government, have really come out and asked the Super Committee to think about going beyond the one-and-a-half trillion-dollar cut mandate. I had a press conference the day after that letter was sent saying that I supported that objective and I believed that it was critical if we were going to get to where we need to be and have a country that is on a sound fiscal footing. The Joint Committee needs to go big. Policymakers need to be looking and going big. As far as I'm concerned, we have to have a go big approach to this particular problem. I believe that this committee ought to go big. I think there's no substitute for a go big approach. We absolutely do need to go big because the problems that we're facing on our deficit are big. Failure is not an option for the deficit reduction committee. If your horse drops dead, it's pretty smart of you to get off.