(FORTUNE Magazine) – The day after casting a crucial vote for President Clinton's budget plan in the House, Timothy Penny (D-Minnesota) announced that he would not seek a seventh term. Penny, 41, cited family reasons, but also said he was frustrated with Congress and the deficit. Here are Penny's ideas on balancing the budget, drawn from an interview with Suneel Ratan of FORTUNE:

The first year of any new Administration presents the opportunity to make some tough decisions and build bipartisan coalitions to resolve lingering problems. We missed that opportunity. Neither party has the right formula for deficit reduction. The solution requires bipartisanship, and after six months of controversy the best we could do was a half-measure. We left entitlements nearly untouched. Even with our so-called cuts, Medicare and Medicaid will be growing at 9% a year. Other entitlements, like retirement and farm programs, were treated with kid gloves. No one's going to like cutting entitlements, but then, no one liked the Clinton budget. The voters are angry anyway, so we should give them something to be really angry about by making the deep cuts that are required. We're going to have to tamper with COLAs (automatic cost-of-living adjustments in benefit programs). We're not going to solve the problem as long as nearly half of the budget is automatically rising 7% a year. We have to tell people that COLAs are not a God-given right. We can't put the retirement programs on automatic pilot and expect to solve our budget problem. We tinkered a bit with COLAs for early government retirees, but that's all we did and it's precious little. We're going to have to start talking about means-testing benefits. Senior citizens pay only 25% of the cost of their Medicare premiums, and some of them can afford the full premium. We had an opportunity to have an income-based need test, and we didn't tackle that issue. We didn't tackle it because Democrats are the traditional champions of Social Security and Medicare, and Republicans are afraid to touch them. So no one wants to put them on the table. We really need to balance the budget. Annual interest payments are approaching $200 billion. It's a quiet crisis, but people are beginning to figure it out. The Perot phenomenon shows that voters are catching on and trying to send us a message. People are becoming more agitated with every year that goes by. They've figured out that we're on a dangerous course.