Bipartisan Deficit Commission
Unlike Atrios I don’t find the idea of a bipartisan commission “that could force tax increases and spending cuts” to necessarily be a terrible idea. But the idea of a bipartisan commission aimed at proposing a set of tax increases and spending cuts that could reduce the deficit implies that two (”bi”) parties believe that long-term deficits should be increased through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Do any leading figures in the Republican Party think that? And if not, who’s going to serve on the commission?
I hear self-proclaimed moderate Democrats talk about the need to restrain spending all the time. But I never hear even the very most RINOish of congressional Republicans talk about the need for tax hikes. In that column, you have Bruce Bartlett and nobody, and he’s a pariah. A “California scenario” in which a rump GOP fanatically opposed to tax increases is able to block any kind of resolution of structural deficit issues, forcing the country into bankruptcy doesn’t strike me as all that unlikely.
Back in early October, CAP hosted a big conference on developing a progressive approach to the long-term deficit. Plenty more thoughts there.
29 Responses to “Bipartisan Deficit Commission”
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November 1st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
“implies that two (”bi”) parties believe that long-term deficits should be increased” – I believe you mean decreased there.
However, I think the awfulness Atrios points to is that a lot of the deficit hawks want these cuts and hikes to start happening now and are the same people standing athwart any additional stimulus saying “no!” The key debate here is short-term versus long-term.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Given that you are essentially an aristocrat, it wouldn’t bother you for a council of the economic elite to force spending cuts. For most Americans, it would be a nightmare. For a committed Democrat, it would be a crime against democracy. To a committed constitutionalist, it would be an usurpation of constitutional perrogatives. To an aristorcrat? It’s the way things should be done. Can’t have that rabble and their pathetic ‘opinions’ entering into it, now can we?
November 1st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I think you mean “decreased” (or you have excessive snark).
“believe that long-term deficits should be increased through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases.”
November 1st, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Unless the $680 billion defense budget is part of the process, no Democrat should be involved.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:53 pm
You could reverse the article, and use the terms “Democrats” and “spending cuts” the same way. Bear in mind that for Democrats, increasing spending on program X by 3 percent, when the budget called for a 5 percent increase, is a cut.
In such an atmosphere, it’s seems pretty clear to me why there’s Republican opposition to raising taxes – there’s not anything that even resembles the notion of being willing to cut spending, on anything.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:57 pm
The PUBLIC, by significant majorities in all polling, is opposed to both spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the deficit. And when they learn what has to get cut to make a dent, the numbers get even more lopsided.
Worrying about the deficit is what pols and voters do when they want to express concern about the world going to hell in handcart without requiring any action that would cause them personal sacrifice to do something about it. It is a fraudulent issue for a society that has created fraudulent politics.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Recall that the GOP still believe that by REDUCING taxes, you’ll INCREASE tax receipts. And, we all know the democrats won’t stand up to the GOP, so what we’ll get is lower taxes (and lower tax revenue). Besides the entitlements, the only read category of spending that needs to be trimmed back is Defense. Not even the GOP will cut spending there. We may lose a lot of great little gov’t programs, but none big enough to even make a dent in the deficit, much less offset the supposedly revenue-raising tax cuts.
This would be a disaster. It’d just give the GOP yet another way to sink this country with their absurd notions of what it means to be fiscally responsible (cut taxes to zero and give the military whatever they want, no matter the cost).
November 1st, 2009 at 1:02 pm
James, you fucking idiot, the Democrats use something called “constant dollars” you should look into it. Knowing little things like this will help keep you from looking like a total fucking moron.
Trust us, nitwit, the problem is the Republicans. You know, the guys who ran up a massive deficit under the empty suit who, even now is underqualified to hold the office of President – after serving two terms. Yeah, those guys did nothing to control the deficit, either through taxes or spending curbs, even though they fully controlled three branches of government. Now that they control only the Judiciary, they have consistently blocked any attempts to fix the damage caused by your idiot President and his free spending cronies.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Right, the problem is all with Republicans. The Democrats have all the levers now, and under their plans, the debt is scheduled to rise by $9T over the next decade.
Get back to me when you can grasp the concept of “sacred cow”, and the additional concept that each party has plenty of said sacred cows.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:16 pm
implies that two (”bi”) parties believe that long-term deficits should be increased through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Do any leading figures in the Republican Party think that?
No, but maybe some GOP eminences grises do? Is Howard Baker still alive and well? How about Bob Dole? George Schulz? James Baker? These are the sorts of people you usually stick on these committees.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:17 pm
As alluded to in #4, the implicit idea is what part of democratic-favored programs are to be cut. That’s the level of dishonesty that has to be dealt with from the get-go. I’m for cutting the student-loan subsidy to banks, for cutting the farm subsidies to agribusiness, and for cutting military spending, among other things.
So don’t tell me I’m some sort of liberal against cutting government spending. The only question between the two major parties really(or should be) is which major spending gets cut. I favor the military, myself. Cut spending in half, and we still have a kick-ass machine more than capable of defending the U.S. And it would free up a lot of dollars that could be spent on things like improvements in infrastructure, health care, etc. while still resulting in an overall cut in spending.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:28 pm
The Democrats have all the levers now, and under their plans, the debt is scheduled to rise by $9T over the next decade.
The Democrats’ plans obviously have to operate in the real world as bequeathed to them by eight years of disastrously harmful and ineffective presidential leadership. That real world includes vastly higher interest expenses from Bush’s accumulated deficits, vastly higher military expenditures due to Bush’s disastrous war-mongering, and a collapse in revenues due to the Bush’s Great Recession. The only way to balance the budget in the near/medium term would be to enact massive spending cuts combined with massive tax increases. The economy isn’t strong enough for such a course of action.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Thank you Jasper for pointing out the obvious to James “I don’t understand why the Democrats haven’t magically fixed the problems my party created even though my party is currently in the process of undermining every possible solution” Robertson.
He won’t get it because he is, in fact, a total fucking moron. He has totally missed the damage caused by lowering taxes on those with the greatest ability to pay while simultaneously undermining the regulatory authority of the government and creating massive spending. Not to mention his total dismissal of the power his do-nothing party still has in congress.
In the real world, fuckwit, the Democrats don’t hold all the levers of power because the Senate rules (and, frankly, their own cowardice) gives veto power to the idiots you support – and they are busy using it to destroy the nation.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:38 pm
No it wouldn’t. It would be spent on the debt.
Let me give you folks a sense of proportions here. The current deficit for 2009 is $1.4 Trillion. All the personal income taxes collected for 2006, that people busted their humps for, sweated and slaved over, all of it…. only came to about $1 Trillion.
It’s staggering. Every penny contributed by the citizens won’t even cover the credit card charges.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Yes moron, the Reagan/Bush deficit is staggering and the cleanup costs for the toxic waste left by them is equally staggering.
As for James, we can talk about sacred cows when your party takes a smidgen of responsibility for their destruction of our nation’s finances. Until then, stop whining and try contributing to the cleanup effort.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:59 pm
The current deficit for 2009 is $1.4 Trillion. All the personal income taxes collected for 2006, that people busted their humps for, sweated and slaved over, all of it…. only came to about $1 Trillion. It’s staggering. Every penny contributed by the citizens won’t even cover the credit card charges.
It’s your ignorance that’s staggering. The revenue from the personal income tax rather obviously doesn’t constitute “every penny contributed by citizens.” Have you never heard of payroll taxes? The corporate income tax? The estate tax? Federal excise and consumption taxes? User fees, rents and leases?
November 1st, 2009 at 2:07 pm
The notion of a bipartisan “commission,” especially one made up of unelected officials (as proposed by Jasper at comment #10) is fundamentally undemocratic. Congressmen are supposed to make these decisions. That’s what we’re paying them for! And there is no reason why the discredited Republicans should have equal say with the party that actually won the election.
Comments #4 and #11 are also right on point. When we look at the actual sources of federal spending, it comes down to four things: military spending, debt service, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to these four. Cutting Social Security or Medicare would have devastating effects on America’s elderly, and would severely erode trust in the government that promised these benefits and then refused to deliver. It’s also politically impossible. Debt service is required by the U.S. Constitution, and even if it wasn’t, refusing to pay these bills would mean the destruction of our national credit rating. That leaves the military. In contrast to the other three major areas of spending, it’s hard to see why we couldn’t enact fairly major cuts (10 to 60 percent) in military spending, or how there would be any catastrophic consequences if we did. Quite frankly, if we were concerned only with actually defending the U.S., and not with letting ambitious politicians play Caesar across the world, we could probably keep the Navy and abolish the other three military branches altogether. With boomer subs and 300 million privately owned firearms, who in their right mind is going to invade the United States?
November 1st, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Fiscally, the two things we need to look at from a long-term perspective are (1) scaling back our military commitments and (2) taxing consumption (carbon emissions in particular, but also a VAT) rather than work.
The second is particularly crucial: environmental challenges demand it, but also politically we have to get away from consumers expecting more and cheaper stuff as a birthright. Because sane, non-bubblicious economic growth in a global age is sure to be more modest than in the last 60 years. But neither of these things is going to happen in the current congressional term; we need to be laying the groundwork for them.
People seem to draw exactly the wrong lessons from the Republican control of government from 2002-2006. They seem to think, like Rove did, that you only have this limited window and if you don’t enact your entire agenda within that window, you’ll never get another chance. But the real lesson is that the window is only that small if you govern as badly as the Republicans did.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:30 pm
The notion of a bipartisan “commission,” especially one made up of unelected officials (as proposed by Jasper at comment #10) is fundamentally undemocratic.
Arguably, nothing is further from the truth. The whole point of such kabuki dancing is to give legislators political cover. If the process weren’t highly democratic, such kabuki dancing wouldn’t be needed. But regrettably, many lawmakers are fearful of forcing their constituents to take much-needed medicine. I don’t think anybody is proposing we give a bipartisan committee actual power to create law. Obviously any recommendations would have to be followed up by legislation.
I should point out that my first choice would be for Obama and the Democrats to simply force through a progressive agenda with respect to taxing and spending, and long term fiscal sustainability. That agenda would undoubtedly include higher taxes on the wealthy, and getting serious about taxing carbon. I believe it should and most likely will have to include some kind of VAT, as well (although I understand this is not a universally held opinion among liberals).
But my point is, if we eventually are able to enact a sensible set of proposals that puts the country’s finances on a prudent long term course, who cares if we had to get the recommendation of some 83 year old, semi-retired Republican (a person would likely be a Democrat were he fifty again) in order to get it done? I’ll take bipartisan committee-enabled legislation over none at all.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Josh@17: It’s rather worse than that, really. Social Security is funded through separate payroll taxes and is (in theory) a dedicated income stream, ditto for a large chunk of Medicare/Medicaid. Remember all the hoopla in ‘83 or thereabouts that FICA contributions had to be increased to avoid some future insolvency? And they were?
Cutting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid would either reduce FICA accordingly, so that no money is really saved, or would be nothing more than theft. Notice also how what is left over – military spending and interest on the national debt – is fundamentally spending for the benefit of ‘the rich’. Spare me the tiny violins and crocodile tears about ‘the little guy’ being the prime beneficiary of servicing the the national debt; while in aggregate that may be true, proportionally speaking, the average wealthy individual benefits far more than the average middle class person.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:51 pm
The “California Option” of a process held hostage by a cabal of arch-conservatives that will doom the country to bankruptcy unless overruled by liberals willing and able to fight off accusations of being “socialist” and “undemocratic” is already here.
Tax increases are anathema for anyone who calls himself a conservative, and especially large tax increases and tax increases that fall most heavily on the rich, corporations, and paper assets, which is where most of the money to be taxed is. Most Democratic legislators do not have the balls to raise taxes on their donors, never mind the public spirit necessary to raise taxes on themselves.
While most spending cuts are unacceptable to anyone who calls himself a liberal, we see a huge amount of fat to be cut in the forms of military spending and other corporate subsidies of such number, scale, and sophistication as to defy concise description. However, these too are conservative sacred cows, which must be preserved and hopefully expanded by cutting everything else.
November 1st, 2009 at 3:04 pm
This is the quintessential pony plan. Come on now.
Maybe in some ideal Norman Rockwell reality this might possibly be a good idea.
But in our actually existing world of papercuts and cable news, this notion translates to one thing: cut entitlements. The only taxes they would raise would be payroll taxes, and the only spending they would cut would be Social Security and Medicare.
They have been flogging this as the solution to every problem that has captured DC’s passing fancy for decades now, “Republicans” and “Democrats” alike.
November 1st, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Bring back the Concord Coalition! [/snark]
November 1st, 2009 at 6:14 pm
who cares if we had to get the recommendation of some 83 year old, semi-retired Republican (a person would likely be a Democrat were he fifty again) in order to get it done?
Well, there’s the problem of any commission most likely being selected from that class of Very Serious People who, safely out of office, get to play fiscal scold on Social Security and Medicare from the sidelines. We’re talking about people like Bob Dole, whose time as Senate Maj Leader set in place the obstructionist model followed by McConnell today.
November 1st, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Re: A “California scenario” in which a rump GOP fanatically opposed to tax increases is able to block any kind of resolution of structural deficit issues, forcing the country into bankruptcy doesn’t strike me as all that unlikely.
It’s completely impossible because nations can’t declare bankruptcy, and there is no legal structure which could take a national government into receivership.
November 1st, 2009 at 9:19 pm
JonF, all that means is that the country can’t get “protection from its creditors”. What such protection would mean, or how it would matter, for a superpower armed to the teeth and intermittently drunk in the stewardship of that might, is best left as an exercise for the reader.
But the USA could certainly default on its debts; other countries have from time to time, and Newt Gingrich refused to rule it out during the government shutdown brinksmanship of 1995.
November 1st, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Bi-partisan commissions can only work when there is already power sharing going on. In 1983, Democrats controlled the House and Republicans the white house and the Senate, so reforming Social Security needed both parties and if nothing was done, both parties would take blame. Today, why would the core of the Republican party agree to this? Better to just let the Democrats fight it out and keep saying no and throwing up viewgraphs about a better plan you’ve got. The commissions is going to recommend higher taxes and cutting popular spending and why own that unless you have to. To work on the deficit, the Democrats have to cut real programs, while an out of power opposition just has to propose cutting waste, fraud and abuse.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:25 am
California just tried something similar with its Commission on the 21st Century Economy. Instead of looking at Prop. 13 the commission decided to recommend collapsing six tax brackets to two and applying sales tax to services. As the LA Times noted,
rather than tackling the tough issues, the commission produced a plan that would shift the burden of state taxes away from the wealthy and toward the middle class and the poor.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:20 am
Forcing the country into bankruptcy is the stated Republican goal. That’s what “starve the beast” means.