As Congress continued to debate the debt ceiling this week, Betsey Stevenson weighed in.
"I want to clarify that the debt ceiling fight is not a fight over how much debt we should have. When we debate how much we're going to spend and how much we're going to tax, those are spending plans and revenue plans," she told Newsweek's The Debate Podcast. "The debt ceiling fight is about an artificial line where we say, well, we all passed—Republicans and Democrats together—bills that mean that we systematically, year after year, bring in less revenue than we spend. We need to agree on what our spending plans should be. We need to agree on what our revenue plan should be, and then that's going to result in debt."
Stevenson also commented on a bipartisan bill recently introduced by Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) that would support financial literacy education for students. Stevenson said that the program could be beneficial, but would need to be analyzed for its impacts on youth credit payments and credit scores as well as if students were better equipped for financial planning in early adulthood.
"The idea here isn’t that the kids are going to end up with a ton of savings at the end, it’s that they’re going to learn some financial literacy,” Stevenson said to Michigan Advance. “I think there’s definitely a lot to learn about how intervening early on by teaching financial literacy will play out in young people’s lives.”
Read the news items featuring Stevenson below:
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Kids often struggle with money matters. A new bill in Congress aims to change that., Michigan Advance, October 4, 2021
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The Debt Ceiling Is an Artificial Crisis, Newsweek's The Debate Podcast, October 5, 2021
