A Conversation on the National Debt

Erskine Bowles is President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina, where he served as president for five years. Previously, he served in the Clinton Administration as director of the Small Business Administration and then as the President's Chief of Staff. In that role, he helped negotiate the first balanced federal budget in a generation. Bowles later became United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to coordinate the global response to the catastrophic tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in 2004. During his last year as UNC president, he was appointed by President Obama to co-chair, along with Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a bipartisan national commission on how to improve the country's fiscal health. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform's recommendation of tax increases and spending cuts have been praised by many but have made little progress in a divided Congress.