A fundamental flaw in much of our current political debate is the notion that something can or even should be made permanent. Conservatives have pushed constitutional amendments as a way of permanently preventing same sex marriage; there's talk of passing a balanced budget amendment to prevent deficits in the future (also a sure sign that the people proposing it are profoundly lazy but that's another post). At a basic level, what we ban today we may wish to allow tomorrow. The point of amending constitutions is to make it as difficult as possible for future majorities to undo the will of today's majority (which has the added advantage for people pushing them of extending today's culture wars into the future - when tomorrow's majorities are ready to overturn the anti-gay marriage amendments, tomorrow's right wingers will have a field day fear-mongering and fund-raising).
That said, Ezra Klein is right in principle when he writes:
What we need isn’t a grand bargain on deficit reduction, though grand bargains are good for me personally because they’re interesting to write about. What we need is for this Congress and subsequent Congresses to be committed to reducing the deficit. That means no more unpaid-for tax cuts, a steady effort to use the Affordable Care Act’s cost controls aggressively, some sort of deal on Social Security, and attention to other problems and opportunities as they crop up. That also means no more taking taxes off the table, or pretending for budget purposes that we’re going to cut payments to doctors — or care for seniors -- by some gigantic amount no matter the consequences.
No deal is worth anything if it’s not honored by future Congresses. Right now, we have laws on the books that would bring the budget back into primary balance — the graph atop this post is CBO’s projection of what would happen if we simply stick to current law -- but no one expects them to be enforced.
Real deficit and debt reduction are a true decades' long process, just as getting to the current state of affairs has taken decades.
Future majorities may be faced with circumstances that we cannot predict today. We need to craft policies today as intelligently as possible to make it easy for tomorrow's majorities to abide by them - and we need to trust tomorrow's majorities to behave responsibly if we behave responsibly (I know that responsible behavior has been a sadly dimishing commodity in recent years). If we start acting responsibly today - trimming government spending, crafting better tax laws, expanding on the means we have of controlling rising health care costs - we make it easier for tomorrow's majorities to act responsibly but also to give them opportunities to respond to tomorrow's problems. If the tax rates of the 1990s had been left place, a huge portion of our current deficit wouldn't exist. A NY Times article today points out that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled, 75% of the short term and 40% of the long term deficits go away. We behaved badly in 2001 and 2003 which today limits our options. Had Republicans foregone their theological commitment to tax cuts and just left well enough alone, we would not be having a nearly unhinged discussion about deficits we're currently having.
The broader point remains, however, that even if we do our level best to craft intelligent policy, there's nothing we can legitimately do as today's majority to bind tomorrow's majorities. If some future Congress wants to cut tax rates to zero and run the government entirely without revenue, they can do that. The democratic contract means we do our best to be responsible stewards of the nation and trust future generations to be responsible stewards.