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Jackson resident worries about the fiscal cliff

Paul Hansen is the regional director for the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates reducing the nation's deficit. He travels across Wyoming and the West to convince people of the importance of reducing the national debt.

"Everywhere I go people get it... People understand that everything has to be on the table and people understand that we have compromise in order to solve this problem."

Hansen says everyone that is except Congress. He doesn't mince words when describing lawmakers’ inability to reach an agreement to avoid going over the so-called fiscal cliff. 

"It's a fiscal slope not really a fiscal cliff 'cause it's going to be implemented over an entire year. It's still a stupid way to run a great nation."

Hansen says both Democrats and Republicans have to agree on a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the nation's debt. Hansen argues that tax revenue is at the lowest percentage of the Gross Domestic Product since World War II -- a rate he says that's too low to operate a nation.  Hansen warns that a failure to compromise could risk the nation's reputation as a stable and reliable economy. 

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.
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