WASHINGTON -- Erskine Bowles said "everything is on the table" - including raising taxes and cutting Medicare and Social Security - when the bipartisan commission created by President Barack Obama begins meetings on how to reduce the national debt.
A White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, Bowles, 64, will be stepping down at the end of the year as president of the University of North Carolina system. In the closing months of his tenure, he will also be the Democratic co-chairman of the debt-reduction commission.
"I'm pretty well known to have a strong work ethic," he said in an interview Thursday. "I'm not afraid of getting both jobs done."
But Bowles declined to discuss his preferences or predict what proposals will prevail.
"Everything is everything," Bowles said. "I don't think you're going to be able to get there if you take anything off the table. We've got to look at good ideas, bad ideas and think about all of them."
Formally named the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the 18-member commission is charged with developing a list by Dec. 1, after November's midterm elections, on how to balance the federal budget - excluding interest on the national debt - by 2015.
It has been a political football this week, with Republicans calling it little more than a "blue-ribbon panel" that won't help with immediate needs.
Still, Republican congressional leaders are expected to appoint members to the group.
"This is not a Republican or a Democrat issue. This is an American challenge," Bowles said. "If we don't [solve it], there's going to be real problems.
"From a university perspective, if we don't get this deficit in hand, there's not going to be any money to invest in education and innovation and research."
Bowles said Obama called him about a week ago about the commission, asking for his help, promising that "every thing would be on the table" and telling Bowles that he had selected a Republican co-chairman, former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming.
"I knew that was someone who was serious and someone I could be proud to be their partner," Bowles said.
Obama described Simpson, 78, as "a flinty Wyoming truth-teller."
Grover Norquist, the president of the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, said that as a senator, Simpson twice helped broker major deficit-reduction deals that included tax increases. Norquist predicted that Democrats expect Simpson to do the same in this new role.
The full panel has yet to be selected. Six members, including Simpson and Bowles, are to be chosen by the president, with no more than four Democrats. In addition, three members will be chosen by Democratic and Republican leaders in each chamber of Congress, for a total of 12 congressional appointees.
Obama said the commission could give Congress political cover to enact debt containment measures for which voters might otherwise punish lawmakers.
"The politics of dealing with chronic deficits is fraught with hard choices, and, therefore, it's treacherous to officeholders here in Washington," Obama said. "As a consequence, nobody has been too eager to deal with it."
