Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles on Sunday said he was optimistic that the White House and lawmakers would reach a deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff.”
“I’m a little more encouraged than if you would have asked me about it a week ago,” said Bowles, a co-chairman of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have started to tango now and any time you got two guys in there tangoing, you got a chance to get it done.”
But Bowles warned that any deal would need to rein in spending.
“Even if you raise the top rates back to the Clinton rates, that only creates $400 billion over 10 years. That’s $40 billion a year. We got a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit. That alone won’t solve the problem,” Bowles said.
“We have to slow the rate of growth of healthcare to the rate of growth of the economy,” he added.
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