Brian F. Keane: “Debt talks remind me of high school.”

SmartPower President Brian F. Keane has a brand new column on the Huffington Post, taking House Republicans to task for walking away from the debt ceiling negotiation table - especially since bipartisan efforts have solved big fiscal problems in the past:

Twenty years ago I worked for two U.S. senators, one Democrat, Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), and one Republican, Warren Rudman (R-N.H.). They had joined forces to create an organization called the Concord Coalition, designed to eliminate the federal budget deficit. If you recall, in 1992 the overwhelming economic concern was our deficit spending. Our work at Concord, along with the leadership of President Clinton and a number of courageous Democrats in the House of Representatives, helped eliminate the federal budget deficit.

Indeed, it was President Clinton’s 1993 budget deal that created the glide path to a zero deficit. That’s right: in 1993, without a single Republican vote, we took our economy from “deficits as far as the eyes can see” to a surplus that resulted in one of the longest economic booms in our country’s history.

Read more over at the Huffington Post.