Deficit panel to be commended
Today’s vote by President Obama’s deficit commission looks to be anti-climactic. No one expects the tough, fundamental reforms recommended by its co-chairmen to get the supermajority vote needed to send them to Congress. Still, the panel’s work is a success far beyond what most people thought possible.
As panel member Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) put it, “This plan is a plan.” That was an acknowledgement that no one else has come up with a deficit-reduction proposal as comprehensive and as credible, with the added benefit of a bipartisan pedigree. It provides a framework, or at the very least a starting point, for the tough economic decisions facing the White House and the new Congress.
When the commission was established earlier this year, the near-unanimous verdict was that the panel headed by former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson would turn out like most other special presidential committee undertakings: It would be a flash in the pan producing highfalutin’ rhetoric but quickly fading from view.
Yet Bowles and Simpson gained instant credibility when their initial report advocating spending cuts and new revenues attacked a host of sacred cows — military spending and the home mortgage income-tax deduction, for example — while pushing common sense reforms for Social Security and rewriting the tax code. Even if, as expected, the panel’s report fails to win the 14 votes of the 18 members needed to make its recommendations official, the work of Bowles and Erskine will float over Washington like a lifeline in these troubled economic times.
The U.S. government borrows nearly 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Its annual deficit runs north of a trillion dollars. In just 15 years it will take every dollar collected in taxes to fund the interest on the national debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The debt is headed to mushroom to nearly twice the size of the American economy by 2035.
This is simply not sustainable. We have only to look at Greece and Ireland to see the calamity that engulfs nations living beyond their means. At the height of the economic crisis, Obama called on the nations of the world to follow the U.S. lead with more spending. He heard a resounding no. A frugal Germany is sailing the rough economic seas in much better shape. A new British coalition government has adopted tough austerity measures to the approval of the voters, polls show.
Mindful of politics, Bowles and Simpson incorporated ideas from the left and right in their deficit report. Liberal Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) won addition of a payroll tax holiday to boost job creation. Conservative Colburn got $50 billion in specific spending reductions.
This plan is not perfect. None ever is. Conservatives recoil at its embrace of ObamaCare, proof that this radical overhaul of health care, rammed through Congress on a partisan vote, will poison our political environment for years to come.
Interest groups are protesting. Realtors complain touching the mortgage deduction endangers a fragile housing market. Trial lawyers see their jackpot jury verdicts threatened by medical malpractice reform. Ultra-liberal Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) views the commission she sits on as some sort of social welfare project to reduce the “growing disparity” between rich and poor. AARP complains about changes to Social Security, though liberal Durbin acknowledges increasing the retirement age to 68 by 2050 is hardly radical.
Getting out of the country’s fiscal mess won’t be easy or pain-free. But Bowles and Simpson have shone a light on a path out of the nation’s bankrupt and bankrupting spending lifestyle. The alternative is, as Coburn put it, “disaster.”