Whether you call it the Catfood Commission or the Deficit Commission or the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, about the only thing we seem to agree on is that it exists.
Commissions can do very important things. What we know today as the Pecora Commission exhaustively investigated what happened leading up to the Great Depression and led directly to sweeping legislation in the 1930s. It's also a reminder that political agitation against shortcomings of a commission and change in leadership on a commission can be quite effective.
But where there is considerably less value added by commissions is when their mandate is vague or there's nothing to investigate.
The President signed an Executive Order creating this particular commission (specifically, by adding it to the Executive Office of the President). It will prepare a report by December 1 (if approved by 14 members). The President will send this report to Congress.
What fascinates me is that it's all a political charade. This report could be written right now. It could be sent to Congress right now. We know what's going on with the federal budget at a big picture level.
(And importantly, we know that the deficit isn't a problem - name a politician that hasn't voted for unfunded spending, after all. But for the sake of this piece, let's move forward with the understanding that for whatever combination of reasons, people in Washington are talking about deficits at this moment in time.)
Specifically, the Commission shall propose recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015
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In addition, the Commission shall propose recommendations that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook, including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.
Those aren't technical questions that we need to investigate. We have tons of information about the medium and long-term fiscal options available to the Federal Government. The questions are political.
There are three basic questions that cover the entirety of our present national debt and future projected deficits. Answering these three questions would address how to balance the budget in 2015 and the long-run fiscal outlook.
- On the revenue side, how much taxation should wealthy Americans pay?
- On the expense side, how much should we spend on military/defense/intelligence/security?
- With regard to entitlements, what do we want to do about projected growth in healthcare costs?
There's no 'consensus' or 'bi-partisan compromise' that can magically create new information about these choices. They're very simple at a conceptual level. We're not inventing aviation here. We're just determining if we want to buy a plane ticket. Our military spending is larger than all the rest of the discretionary budget combined. The only way to balance the budget by 2015 is to cut military expenses or raise taxes on the wealthy (or some combination thereof). That's just basic accounting. You could eliminate the entire Environmental Protection Agency, the entire Labor Department, the entire Justice Department, and it wouldn't balance the budget.
Other ideas could certainly be raised, like cutting benefits for Social Security, or eliminating programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, or freezing nonsecurity discretionary spending for three years. But the key observation is that these are red herrings. They're so unimportant to our fiscal outlook as to render illegitimate their proponents in any discussion about deficits and fiscal responsibility. Even within Social Security, the choices are easy. We eliminate the cap on income taxation, or we cut benefits; Social Security is the most fiscally sound major program in the entire government. And even if 'shoring up' Social Security were needed, it wouldn't be relevant to the deficit - Medicare & Medicaid specifically, not traditional Social Security (ie, old age, disability, and survivors insurance), is where the discussion needs to happen from a budget perspective (because in our system which lacks universal healthcare, our costs are projected to rise much faster than the rest of the industrialized world).
So the question I have is what's the point? Why should I support the President's creation of the commission? Why should I support the President's choice of Alan Simpson as a co-chair? Why can't we have an open and honest discussion about what programs are worth funding at what levels and how we want to raise the revenue to pay for them? What do 18 people - most of whom are politicians, CEOs, or think tankers - have to say on a topic like this that is more relevant, more valuable, than all of us? What expertise do they bring to the Executive Branch that the Executive Branch doesn't already have? And why haven't people in the Administration already thought about these things? Why have Democrats passed the most expensive defense budget in the history of our country while keeping in place the Bush tax cuts - even allowing the estate tax to expire this year? To this day, no one will answer the question of who should pay for EESA (TARP) and all the other trickle-down corporate welfare. To claim that something valuable will come out of this commission is very close to claiming implicitly that Democratic leaders have been negligent since we captured Congress and the White House.
After all, nothing has changed. The link I used on the NEA? That's from a Heritage discussion on the deficit from 1997. And in the intervening years, we massively increased the national debt. But magically, that wasn't a problem when the money was spent on tax cuts for the rich and war profiteering and corporate welfare. Why would any Democrat go along with the notion that the deficit is a problem now?
Crossposted at The Seminal at FDL.