Lawrence J.
Haas
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February 24, 2009
Budget Commission? Bad
Idea; Responsible Budgeting is Congress’s Job
As
President Obama focuses the nation’s attention on the prospect of huge,
long-term federal budget deficits, some experts in Congress and
elsewhere will try to build momentum to create a “budget commission”
that would draft a deficit-cutting plan on which Congress would then
vote.
The idea is borne of frustration with soaring deficits and with
Washington’s seeming inability to address them. But however laudable are
the motives of its proponents, a commission is a bad idea – one that is
both unnecessary and unlikely to work.
To
be sure, the idea has important backers. In the Senate, the chairman of
the Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, and its top Republican, Judd Gregg,
have proposed such a commission. So, too, in the House have Jim Cooper,
a moderate Democrat, and Frank Wolf, a moderate Republican.
So, too, in the private sector, have such budget gurus as former Clinton
budget director Alice Rivlin, former Congressional Budget Office
director Robert Reischauer, and top officials from think tanks and
deficit-focused organizations such as the Concord Coalition and the
Peterson Foundation.
The task at hand is an awesome one. The federal government will run a
budget deficit this year of about $1.5 trillion, about three times the
previous record of $455 billion from last year. Worse, this year’s
deficit will total about 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product, marking
the largest peacetime deficit as a share of the economy in the nation’s
history.
What has experts really worried, however, is the long term. Even after
the economy recovers from the recent downturn, experts expect the
government to routinely run deficits of more than 4 percent of GDP,
which they consider harmful to long-term economic growth.
For Washington to significantly reduce the deficit, policymakers will
have to address every major part of the fiscal ledger. They must
constrain soaring costs for Medicare and Medicaid (which reflect soaring
health care costs throughout the society), restore the long-term
solvency of Social Security, scale back domestic and defense programs
and raise taxes by a significant amount.
In
fact, Obama has already signaled that, in the economic and budget
blueprint that he will release this week, he will propose to end the
recent tax cuts for taxpayers who earn more than $250,000 a year, to
close corporate tax loopholes and to scale back defense spending.
The problem is that on Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans do not
see eye to eye when it comes to deficit cutting. Republicans are loath
to raise taxes and they will be wary of defense cuts. Democrats are very
reluctant to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
That’s where a commission comes in. Proponents says a diverse group of
outside experts can craft a bipartisan plan outside the glare of
publicity – presumably with a balanced amount of spending cuts and tax
increases – and persuade Congress to adopt it by a single up-or-down
vote.
The theory, however, has two big problems.
First, budget commissions have failed mightily in the past. Congress
established one in late 1987 to draft a budget-balancing plan and it
never reached consensus, with eight members issuing one report, six
members issuing another one and Congress ignoring both.
Congress established another commission in 1993, this one to draft a
plan to control the soaring costs of entitlement programs. This one,
too, ended its work without reaching a consensus.
Second, despite what you hear, Congress has overcome its internal
differences to act responsibly on fiscal policy – not always, to be
sure, but on important occasions nonetheless.
In
1990, the first President Bush worked with a Democratic Congress to
enact a plan to slash deficits by a combined $500 billion over five
years. Three years later, President Clinton worked with another
Democratic Congress to enact another five-year, $500 billion plan.
Together, these two plans, which included tax increases and spending
cuts, proved instrumental in helping Washington transform record
deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s into record surpluses by the late
1990s.
That’s why we have elections – to choose leaders who will address the
nation’s problems. Despite gridlock on many occasions, the system can
work well, as these achievements make clear.
Facing a new set of budget challenges, a new president and Congress
should get to them – not subcontract them out to a private commission
that’s less likely to succeed than they are.
© 2009
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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