The president is not giving up. On Thursday, administration officials say, he will sign an executive order establishing the 18-member National Commission of Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He also will name as co-chairmen Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a moderate Democrat from North Carolina who, as President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, brokered a 1997 balanced budget agreement with Congressional Republicans.
“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said in a telephone interview Tuesday just before word of his role got out. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”
While he criticized some liberal Democrats’ refusal to reduce entitlement benefits, Mr. Simpson also dismissed Republicans’ antitax arguments that deficits could be controlled with spending cuts alone. “But they don’t cut spending,” he said, referring to the years Republicans governed with President George W. Bush.
2 comments:
The GOP opposition to new taxes is our largest long term fiscal threat. The Tea Party Nation - disproportionately recipients of Medicare and Social Security - are adamantly opposed to tax hikes and no GOP pol will cross this vocal bunch.
I think both parties are amenable to gradually raise the eligibility ages of our largest entitlements, but there is no trust between the sides. Neither wants to get stuck advocating such "cutbacks" if the other side pivots to opposition.
I'm going to try to move the debate over to this post from "18-member". I will put this in as simple terms as I possibly can.
Is it possible that we have been living beyond our means? Have we been consuming more than we produce? Yes and yes. So - how do we reconcile this?
It's pretty simple - we need to get less from government or pay more for it (do you believe anyone who says we can have it all without raising taxes?). Or - my favored approach - we need to get less and pay more then have been. We need to pay more in order to pay for what we are getting today, as adjusted by the cuts that we are willing to endure. We have to pay still more to pay down the debt that Reagan and Bush left as our legacy.
Now - you can't put that on a bumper sticker and it certainly doesn't paint a rosy picture. Maybe that is why we don't hear it much if at all. But it is TRUE.
The commission that Simpson will co-chair is a great vehicle to return our nation to fiscal rectitude. We need to not only pay for the mistakes of the past administrations, but also to reconcile the entitlement train wreck that has been scheduled for right about now for the past 30+/- years. The instinct for political survival has prevented either side from acting to date.
Well, we are running out of time and the commission is a tried and true approach. Lets do it.
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