Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips and Vice President Phil Kerpen offer their thoughts about the debt-ceiling dilemma in a new column today posted at National Review Online.

We enthusiastically support the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” framework for debt-ceiling negotiations and are committed to opposing any deal that fails to follow it: substantially cutting spending immediately, capping it going forward, and adopting a balanced-budget amendment with strict tax and spending limitations. But for the cuts to go beyond a blip on the otherwise relentlessly upward march of government spending (or worse, amount to accounting gimmicks), they must be based on specific, structural, permanent reforms to grow the economy while lowering the trajectory of federal spending. Moreover, without those reforms, caps will prove unenforceable when they get overwhelmed by entitlement promises, or when the political pendulum swings back toward tax-and-spenders.