U.S. policymakers must make serious efforts to tackle the ballooning entitlement spending to put the country's fiscal position on a sustainable track, Senator Pat Toomey said here on Tuesday.

"We have to agree on the fundamental problem" that led to the spike of U.S. public debt, as the country's entitlement spending including Medicare and Medicaid was rising much faster than the economic growth pace in recent years, Toomey said at an event hosted by the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution.

The U.S. has to find new government revenues and adopt an " architectural entitlement reform" to deal with the fiscal crisis, said Toomey, a member of the bipartisan "super-committee", formally named the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, created last year and tasked to identify at least 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars in deficit cuts over the next decade.

However, the committee failed to strike a deal last year due to significant differences among Democrats and Republicans, which will trigger automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense programs in a similar size starting in 2013. Spending reductions and tax hikes are set to take effect in January, if current laws were not changed, a scenario dubbed as the "fiscal cliff".

Toomey said he supported one-year extension of all brackets of Bush-era tax cuts that will expire by the end of 2012 for another year to win time for conducting the pro-growth tax reform.

Toomey and other Republican lawmakers' stance was in contrast to that of U.S. President Barack Obama, as the Obama administration was calling for one-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts only for families making less than 250,000 U.S. dollars a year.

The ongoing bipartisan negotiations of coping with the "fiscal cliff" depends on the outcome of the U.S. presidential and congressional elections in November, Toomey added.