For the record: Alan Simpson.

• Position: Interview

Alan Simpson is a former state legislator, Wyoming's colorful and outspoken Republican U.S. senator for 18 years and, most recently, co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. After 10 months of work in 2010, the bipartisan panel's draft recommendations to reduce the deficit by reforming the tax code and cutting entitlements, among other measures, were never officially adopted. Since then, Simpson and his co-chair, Erskine Bowles, have testified before Congress urging adoption of their blueprint for economic recovery.

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State Legislatures: Do you think the recommendations of your fiscal responsibility commission have a chance of being implemented? If not, what's the risk to the country?

Simpson: Oh, I don't know. It's like a stink bomb in a garden party. We just keep telling people what is going on. We are a little disappointed that the president walked away from it. One of the great allies has been Bill Clinton. He actually went to the president and said, "Look, you appointed these guys by executive order." I would have wrapped my arms around it and run with it, but it was not to be. But you know it won't go away. You have an unconscionable, unsustainable, totally predictable chaos coming, and young people aren't paying any attention. They don't seem to get it. I didn't give a damn about anything when I was 20 either.

SL: The president's budget assumes Congress will suspend mandatory cuts in discretionary programs and defense that are supposed to begin next January because the congressional super committee failed to agree on a deficit reform plan. Do you think that will happen?

Simpson: No sane person--the president or anybody in Congress--is going to let that sequester take place. They'll either come up with something or pass a law and suspend that part of it. But it is inexorable. Your country will borrow $3 billion, $600 million today and they will borrow $3 billion, $600 million tomorrow. And it's not going to anything. It is just running the country deeper in the hole. The debt limit now, while we were all asleep the last few weeks, essentially went to $16.2 trillion. People don't understand what $1 trillion is. If you spend a buck a second from right now you wouldn't reach a trillion for 32,500 years.

When [Erskine Bowles] and I go around the country and spend an hour with any group--lefties, righties--we'll get a standing ovation. People are thirsting for someone to tell them the...