David Perdue: Still looking for ‘urgency’ in D.C. | Kyle Wingfield

He didn’t wear his famous jean jacket for his first speech on the Senate floor, but David Perdue still talks about Washington as if he’s an outsider, not an insider.

“I’m trying to help people have a greater sense of urgency on what I think are the greatest crises of the day,” Perdue, Georgia’s brand-new Republican senator, told me by phone recently.

If describing the debt and deficits as a crisis sounds so 2010, keep in mind that Perdue last year elbowed his way past an experienced GOP primary field by talking about the threat they still pose — and the inability of longtime Washington insiders to rein them in.

“We had about six weeks to deal with six years of irresponsibility, and we came up with a budget, and it’s the first budget we’ve had in a while, and it’s the first one that balances (over time), I think, since 2001,” said Perdue. “But it’s not a panacea, it’s not where it needs to be.”

Not, he said, with the debt where it is. “We’ve passed the tipping point with regard to this debt, big-time,” he said. “We have $18 trillion in debt. If interest rates today were at their 30-year (average) rate of just over 5.5 percent, we’d already be paying over $1 trillion (annually) in interest. That’s just not manageable.”

via David Perdue: Still looking for ‘urgency’ in D.C. | Kyle Wingfield.