Saying that he has yet to hear one of the Republican presidential candidates outline a comprehensive approach to dealing with the country’s grave debt crisis, former Gov. George Pataki of New York appears to be inching closer to a possible presidential bid of his own.
In a free-wheeling interview with the Fiscal Times on Thursday, the 66-year-old Pataki said that he hopes a credible candidate touting a thoughtful deficit-reduction plan — somebody with the political skill to defeat President Obama in the general election — will yet emerge from the growing list of Republican presidential hopefuls.
“If not, I’ll certainly feel compelled to take a look,” said Pataki, who served as governor of New York from 1995 to 2006.
“We are engaging in generational theft, stealing from our children so that we can live beyond our means,” Pataki told the Fiscal Times. “That’s not the America I grew up in, and that’s not the America that I think the American people expect.”
The former three-term governor also spoke highly about the Deficit Reduction Commission, the bi-partisan commission headed by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, saying that its $4 trillion proposal for reducing the national debt was an important first step in the process of putting the nation’s fiscal house in order.
“We need to take multi-trillion-dollar action preferably this year and not wait until 2013, and we need to do it in a way that reduces the size and cost of the federal government while empowering the private sector and particular small businesses and entrepreneurs to grow the economy to create the jobs we need,” said Pataki.
Pataki, who chairs a group called No American Debt, an organization he founded in April focusing on restoring fiscal sanity to the United States, also expressed disappointment in Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels decision not to seek the Republican nomination for president. Daniels, he said, has a solid record of accomplishment in Indiana and almost certainly would have made the issue of debt reduction a cornerstone of his candidacy.
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