You can’t balance the budget unless both sides give ground

Rigid positions on taxes, spending undermine deficit reduction panel.

President Obama created a bipartisan commission last month and gave it until December to come up with a plan to begin balancing the federal budget by 2015. Already, though, some members are drawing lines in the sand, warning that they're opposed to raising taxes or cutting big social benefit programs.

In other words, the only real effort to solve one of the nation's most urgent problems is already in danger of paralysis. Every successful attempt to cut the deficit has required partisans on both sides to meet in the middle. There's just no other realistic way to make this work.

Don't take our word for it. That's the conclusion of another bipartisan group that has already worked on the nation's deficit and debt crisis for much of the last year. Its study demolishes the notion that there's any easy fix, or that any of the budget's sacred cows can be easily spared.

You might not have heard much about the Choosing the Nation's Fiscal Future report by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration. It came out the same day as the Haiti earthquake, and it's 338 pages of pretty wonky prose. But the committee's 24 members included liberals, conservatives and three former directors of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. That makes their study an invaluable reality check on the partisan rhetoric and self delusion that typically undermine the deficit debate.

Among the key conclusions:

-- We're in big trouble. Economic recovery alone won't help. "No reasonably foreseeable rate of economic growth" will shrink deficits enough to stop the debt from growing dangerously large, the report says. Without action, the national debt will grow so big that the foreign creditors who now own about half our debt and finance our budget deficits could conclude we're no longer a good investment risk, sending interest rates soaring.

-- Popular solutions such as banning "earmarks," ending all foreign aid or attacking "waste, fraud and abuse" are relatively meaningless. (In fact, getting rid of all defense spending would eliminate less than half of this year's $1.6 trillion deficit. That's how out of whack the budget is.) Saving significant amounts of money will require curbing the growth of the programs most responsible for driving spending out of control: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

-- Partisans on both sides, whose views are reflected in the opposing views that accompany this editorial, are living in a dream world. Walling off benefit programs, as many Democrats demand, would require tax increases so big that the U.S. tax burden would ultimately exceed those of most European countries. And avoiding any tax increases (or even cutting taxes), as many Republicans insist, could require health rationing plus defense cuts so deep that the U.S. could no longer invest in most new weapons systems or fight wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There's no secret about what has to be done. It's the same sort of realistic combination of spending cuts and tax increases that saved Social Security in 1983 and helped produce four years of budget surpluses in 1998 to 2001. What's needed is the political will to do it, bolstered by popular backlash against practitioners of something-for-nothing politics.

Obama's deficit commission is off to an unpromising start, with members on both sides saying what they won't do to produce a solution. Several GOP appointees have signed anti-tax pledges; at least one Democratic appointee is vowing to protect benefit programs. We hope that's just posturing. The commission's job is to provide a road map for solving a real and dangerous problem, not to preserve its members' ideological purity.

Posted at 12:22 AM/ET, March 17, 2010 in USA TODAY editorial

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/ ... round.html