On a Budget Commission
Politicians love commissions. They love them so much that journalists have come to love cynically deriding them. So now that talk of a “budget commission” to tackle the long-term deficit is in the air, people are being cynical about it. I actually think commissions are a pretty good idea since congress is so bad at designing policy. The real question is what would a serious budget commission look like?
I think Pete Davis and Bruce Bartlett have some pretty good posts on this matter. I would say the most important thing is for congress to not entirely abdicate its policymaking role. The key is to actually tell the commission, in a real way, what it wants studied. Reduce the deficit to such-and-such a percent of GDP relative to baseline and do it this percent with tax cuts and this percent with spending cuts. That’s a real mandate, and exactly the sort of decision elected officials should be making. Similarly, if congress wants the Pentagon to get special treatment, they should say so. With that done, having a commission try to work out the details within the framework of a congressional mandate makes sense.
15 Responses to “On a Budget Commission”
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November 7th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Dear Matt: Not going to happen. Ever. The swiftest way for a congressperson to be diselected is to set up an extragovernmental body that raises people’s taxes and cuts their benefits.
“I couldn’t get the bridge from East Nowhere to West Nowhere funded. The commission wouldn’t let me. But how’d you like that national sales tax?”
If pols don’t have the guts to do something themselves, what makes you think they’ll vote to let somebody else make them do it?
November 7th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Tax cuts? When even Yglesias can’t blog about raising taxes, America is doomed. I hope it was a typo.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:53 am
@jmg: can’t say I agree. Consider BRAC: while it didn’t raise anyone’s taxes, it certainly cut a bunch of spending out of a whole bunch of congressional districts. And congressmen were happy to have it – it allowed them to foist the blame onto someone else. That’s the whole point of giving the task to a commission in the first place.
The larger issue: if Congress can’t decide anything themselves any more, why do we have Congress? They cost kind of a lot of money to just sit around and hire other people to make decisions.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:56 am
No, no, no. The problem with all the proposals for ‘Bi-Partisan Commissions based on the model of the Greenspan Commission and the BRAC Commission” is that they are all drawing directly on similar proposals coming out of the Peter G Peterson/Concord complex and in examining all of them it becomes clear that defence cuts and tax increases are off the table leaving only the ‘Entitlement Crisis’ itself a creation of Peterson founded Concord Coalition.
Conrad-Gregg and Cooper-Wolf are structured a little differently, the former proposing to have 14 members from Congress and 2 from the Administration, while the latter would more directly mirror the Brookings/Heritage working group and include outside experts but in each case the decks will be stacked with so-called deficit hawks who oddly never found a military program that was not absolutely vital to the security of the United States.
The ‘White House Fiscal Responsibility Summit’ was directly inspired by ‘Taking Back our Fiscal Future’, the product of the ‘bi-partisan Brookings/Heritage working group. The pre-summit event is described here:
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2008/0331_fiscalfuture.aspx
And the framing of the overall issue was explained as follows:
This is exactly the same method used when Bush formed CSSS: the Commission to Strengthen Social Security in 2001. Set up an evenly balanced group when taken by party registration, but with everyone committed in advance to the proposition that the key threat is “entitlements” and in all cases progressives need not apply.
Conrad-Gregg goes the same route by a different road. Though it proposes 8 Republicans and 8 Democrats two of the later are drawn from the Administration including Geithner serving as chair. Meaning eight congressional R’s to 6 D’s. Moreover 2 of those D’s are bound to be Conrad and Cooper as sponsors of the relevant legislation. Meaning that of the 12 vote ’super-majority’ needed to forward an up or down bill to Congress you have ten locks for slashing ‘entitlements’, plus Geithner, known to be sympathetic plus another Admin rep probably drawn from Orszag, his deputy Liebman (both authors of SS reform plans), Summers, or Goolsbee. Because anyone who thinks Labor Secretary Solis or Jared Bernstein is going to make the cut has another think coming.
Conrad-Gregg is set up so that Pelosi and Reid only have effective control over 4 seats, or two each and will be lucky to even get one progressive on, and given Reid’s typical caution we might end up with one member of the CPC facing 15 budget hawks. And Congress with no effective power to shape the final result.
Under the circumstance and the actual proposals on the table having such a commission doesn’t “make sense”, instead for progressives it is essentially to agree to a suicide pact that commits the Democratic Party to rolling back the Great Society and the New Deal.
If you chase down all the websites and all the mission statements of all the groups and proposals related directly or indirectly to Peter G Peterson (red flags are the inclusion of one or more of Bixby (Concord), Walker (PGP Foundation) or Bergsten (PGP Institute) but also some figures associated with ‘left-leaning’ Brookings and the Urban Institute or the words ‘former CBO’ or ‘former GAO’ director) you will see that the problem and the range of solutions always start and stop with ‘entitlements’.
And that is not hyperbole, all of these games are rigged.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:08 am
You’ve identified the wrong problem. Commissions are not a solution to Congress being bad at policy design. They are a solution to the problem of members of Congress being held accountable.
Dealing with the budget, from a policy perspective, is relatively easy. Raise real corporate taxes and make taxes on individuals more progressive and treat income from non-work the same as income from work. Adopt policies that strengthen job security and wages, as opposed to policies which produce greater inequality. Pick a large number (25 to 33%) to reduce defense spending by, and reach that by reducing high tech, complex weapons systems which serve no defense purpose. End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These options all have broad public support (or, in the case of military spending, do once people hear what we actually spend on the military.) None are that complex. Congress won’t adopt them not because it is bad at policy design, but because its members have a different agenda.
They are not interested in the deficit, but in gutting social spending, particularly social insurance (Medicare, Social Security.) They know full well how to do that too – but it would be extremely unpopular.
A commission is a solution to the problem of how to kill popular programs without political repercussions when the alleged reason for doing so could be easily achieved through popular policies.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Man, conventional wisdom is more incestuous than McKenzie Phillips.
America’s spending issue is the defense budget. Period. Stop fooling around.
We spend $680 billion on defense. Why? Because we waste several hundred billion dollars every year, in an ungodly array of management techniques that no sensible person would tolerate.
Waste has nothing to do with national security, nor foreign policy. It’s just a matter of telling a long series of occasionally powerful constituencies that the taxpayer is not getting enough bang for the buck, so YOUR jobs will be eliminated: no, we don’t need this duplication or that redundancy.
And if you approach it THAT way, you actually get to spend some money making sure that our guys have enough body and vehicle armor, plus proper respect and treatment when they come home.
But, puh-LEEZE, enough with the conventional wisdom crap. One McKenzie Phillips is plenty.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Matt,
When I read Bartlett’s underlying post about a Commission, my initial thoughts were, “This could work, but you need to tinker with the numbers a bit.” In the same way, I think that it is important, if you are progressive, to get out in front of this issue and tinker with the numbers. Make sure that you have 1/3 or 1/4 or 1/2 or whatever be from “tax increases or changes to the tax code”, a similar percentage from military budget cuts, etc.
The point is that the structure is one that gets around the policy-failure that Congress is; how it acheives this is something that should be Congress’s well-debated decision.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Sounds like a great way to give the minority more power than they won. Snark.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Not to worry folks. The Budget Commission will be a reality. Its members will be Chinese. They will make the decisions and we will obey. Because our GOPocrats are incompetent cowards. It will happen. Sooner or later.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:37 am
You’re going to balance the budget with tax cuts?
Congress may be bad at designing policy but commissions are abysmal at implementing policy. Basically, commissions serve as a means for Congress to justify what it was going to do anyway while simultaneously discarding all the commission’s recommendations. I recall what a cracking great success the 9/11 commission was in getting its policy recommendations implemented. If Congress can’t bite the bullet on matters of war and terrorism, what makes you think a deficit commission will be anything other than window dressing?
November 7th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Isn’t every commission automatically headed by Chuck Robb and James Baker?
November 7th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Delaware beats Switzerland as most secretive financial center
http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2009/11/delaware-beats-switzerland-as-most.html
November 7th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Isn’t every commission automatically headed by Chuck Robb and James Baker?
Only if Lee Hamilton is busy on another commission.
November 7th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
MY- you really need to read this book.
November 7th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
This is neither here no there, but the White House and Congressional Democrats should immediately prepare a bill calling for a temporary payroll tax cut. They wouldn’t even have to call it “stimulus” — and the GOP would find it difficult to oppose. I mean, since when have Republicans seen a tax cut they didn’t like? I think odds are that the Democrats will hold onto the House next November, but there’s at least a non-trivial possibility they could lose it. Facing the voters with an unemployment rate of 9.3 % say, instead of 9.8%, could mean the difference. This seems like a total non-brainer to me.