The Debt Commission Chairmen’s Surprising Hidden Agenda
By STUART BUTLER
The sweeping proposal unveiled by the co-chairs of President Obama’s debt commission has left Washington insiders scratching their heads. If Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson were seeking a compromise that would win commission approval and have a chance in Congress next month, why didn’t they craft a modest package with pre-arranged buy-in? Why offer a dramatic plan that caught all sides by surprise and prompted still-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to denounce it as “simply unacceptable.”
Bowles and Simpson are wily political veterans. So what’s really going on?
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Stuart M. Butler heads the Center for Policy and Innovation at The Heritage Foundation.?
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Making the Case for Deficit Reduction
By LAWRENCE HAAS
Policymaking is a zero-sum game. Officials weigh policy proposals not in a vacuum but against the status quo. Implicit in the question “should we do this?” is a second one: “how does it compare to doing nothing?”
That’s what was wrong not only with this week’s efforts by the co-chairs of President Obama’s fiscal commission to promote a plan to restore fiscal sanity, but also with the knee-jerk responses to it as well as the news coverage of it.
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Lawrence J. Haas is former Communications Director to Vice President Gore and, before that, to the White House Office of Management and Budget. He's now a public affairs consultant who writes widely about foreign and domestic affairs, including fiscal policy.
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A Deficit-Reduction Plan Rife With Problems
By HENRY AARON
The draft proposal of the leaders of President Obama’s deficit commission arouses strongly mixed emotions. On the one hand, authors Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson deserve credit, along with others who are addressing the problem of long-term budget deficits, for trying to alert the American public and their elected officials to a problem that most of us would like to disregard.
The solutions to this problem will be painful and divisive. On the other hand, the plan is profoundly disappointing. Although it contains a number of proposals that budget analysts of both parties have long advocated, it sets unnecessarily strict targets that make needed political agreements needlessly difficult and it is vague where specificity is badly needed.
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Henry J. Aaron is the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. The views expressed are his own.
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Budget Commission Delivers Gift to Obama
By LIZ PEEK
Christmas came early for President Obama; he just doesn’t know it yet. The report from the co-chairs of the Deficit Commission lays out a controversial, vigorous and bold package of ideas about how we might reduce our horrifying budget deficits going forward. By embracing these proposals with an open mind, the president has an opportunity to show the country that 1) he received the message so clearly delivered by voters last week and that 2) he actually does want to restore our fiscal integrity.
Not all of the Commission’s ideas will be acceptable, but for the most part they are realistic and necessary. Mr. Obama needs to accept them as a starting point for a much-needed conversation about our country’s future. By doing so, he will distinguish himself from his liberal colleagues, who immediately condemned the proposals, shutting down all dialog. Really, they barely had time to skim the high points.
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Liz Peek, a former top-ranked Wall Street analyst, appears regularly on network and cable news programs.