They say that in a democracy, you get the government you deserve.

We started Sanity Now because we deserve better.

A generation of unsustainable budget deficits has nearly bankrupted our nation. Today, we ask our leaders to change course. Inspired by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and the mission of the bipartisan deficit commission, we started this movement as a call to restore fiscal sanity to American politics.

We all know the story. For a generation, our leaders fed us a Candy Land diet of easy money at every opportunity. Relentless tax cuts and growing fiscal commitments caused the national debt to balloon even as it undermined important public investments like Medicare, schools, and roads—and that was before the Great Recession. Every government, family, and business has to borrow money sometimes. But unless we act, we’ll have massive deficits, year after year, until they bankrupt us.

The challenge we face is not just a fiscal problem; it’s a moral one. It’s a threat to the project known as America.

And so, politicians, when you tell us we can afford over $800 billion in new tax cuts by just tacking it on to the deficit, and when you turn a deaf ear to proposals from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the bipartisan deficit commission on defense and entitlement spending—which together account for 3/4ths of all federal spending—we say: that is insane.

It’s simple: we can’t solve this problem without both reducing the amount of money the government spends and increasing the amount it takes in. Refusing to do one or the other won’t work. We must strengthen our finances on both sides of the equation.

And that’s why we started this campaign. To date, politicians have chickened out, sticking their heads in the sand instead of fixing the problem. If we can show support for a sane conversation on the deficit, we might just get one. And you can join us now, by signing this simple pledge:

     We want to fix the deficit.

     That means we support:
          (1) Reducing spending, AND
          (2) Raising revenue,

     because nothing else will work.

Once we reach agreement on these basic principles, we’ll be able to have a debate worthy of our great nation—a dialogue about which programs to reform or scale back, and about the best ways to raise revenue. But first we need to face facts. We know there are trade-offs. We know we will all have to sacrifice. Americans have never shrunk from the big battles in the past, and we won’t now. The longer we delay, the bigger the mortgage we take out on our children’s future.

No more avoiding the hard decisions. It’s time for Sanity Now.