Posted Apr. 23, 2016 at 10:26 PM 

Tax season is a stark reminder to most Americans of their individual contribution to our government. As a Member of Congress, one of my greatest responsibilities is supporting measures that ensure the taxpayer’s contribution is spent wisely and responsibly.

But, as a leading national news magazine pointed out this week, each American man, woman and child would need to pay $42,998.12 to erase the current national debt.

No one was more passionate about addressing the national debt than my husband Paul Tsongas, who made it a central focus of his 1992 campaign for president. His campaign is credited with helping shape the national dialogue that led to four years of balanced budgets from President Clinton’s administration. Nearly 25 years after Paul declared his candidacy for president, however, America again finds itself grappling with a looming deficit and wide differences on how to get back to black.

Every year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) releases an annual report that forecasts the impact that current policies will have on the federal budget in the years ahead. In January, the CBO announced that thanks to policies passed in the last year, the deficit will grow by $105 billion. But even more striking, is that the CBO also estimated that this deficit could routinely top $1 trillion by 2022.

In its report, the CBO specifically pointed to legislation passed at the end of 2015 that extended $680 billion worth of expiring individual and business tax cuts (often referred to as tax extenders), as one of the key reasons we are seeing the first annual deficit increase in six years. Although the bill passed into law, I voted against this measure last year for all of the reasons this CBO report outlined.

Voting against this tax package was not a simple decision. Many provisions that I have long supported were included in the law and have real merit, such as a permanent extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Child Tax Credit (CTC), and Research and Development Tax Credit, as well as extensions of credits for clean energy and conservation efforts.

But the package came up short in one glaring, and detrimental way. Permanently extending these and many other programs – as worthwhile as they are – come with very real and very sizable costs. And the legislation did nothing to pay for those costs. If we eliminate that much revenue from the federal government by making these tax credits permanent, but don’t ALSO reduce the amount of money the government spends each year, or find other ways to offset the lost revenue, we create a huge hole in the federal budget and we ignore the very real dangers that a growing national debt poses for future generations.

The gap in the federal budget resulting from this tax package is already being used as a scapegoat by those threatening to cut and gut government programs vital to our economy, like Medicare, Social Security and others. By not offsetting the lost revenue in the tax extenders package last year, we give ammunition to those pursuing austerity measures now and in the future.

There are reasonable – and bipartisan – options out there to offset the costs of these tax cut extensions; for example, closing egregious loopholes that allow major corporations to reduce or eliminate the taxes they owe on billions of dollars in profit. Unfortunately, there were no options like that included in the law.

The tax extenders package we passed last year contradicts recent years of deficit reduction our country worked very hard to achieve. We have had to make many difficult decisions that ushered in serious and important deficit reduction. But Congress mitigated that progress with one vote – two steps forward, $105 billion steps back.

U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Lowell, represents the Third District of Massachusetts.