If there’s any hope for making headway this year against America’s debt crisis, it lies with the bipartisan “Gang of Six” in the U.S. Senate. This group is filling the political vacuum created by House Republicans’ lemming-like rush to the ideological cliffs, and President Obama’s reluctance to commit himself on tough fiscal choices.
Led by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, the Gang of Six has picked up where the President’s Fiscal Commission left off. They’ve embraced the commission’s main political breakthrough – a hard-won bargain in which some key conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn agreed to cut tax expenditures, while liberals such as Sen. Dick Durbin agreed to constrain Social Security costs.
This is the only bipartisan game in town, and it makes the Senate the main arena in Washington’s three-ring budget circus. What’s happening in the GOP House is essentially a sideshow, though it could turn into a very destructive bit of political theater.
Despite the jobless recovery, the House proposes to cut $61 billion in domestic spending this year – the largest immediate spending cut in U.S. history. Everyone knows there’s no way such a draconian measure gets through the Democratic Senate or past a presidential veto. Senate Democrats have countered with $6 billion in domestic program cuts, but that’s not likely to clear the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold either.
So we’re in for a game of budgetary chicken in which both sides maneuver to blame the other if the federal government runs out of money in two weeks. Even if there is a federal shut-down, however, it’s unlikely to go on for very long, given how fed up U.S. voters already are with the antics of Washington politicians of all stripes.
But what’s really dumb, if not tragic, is to expend all this political blood and energy in a battle over domestic programs, which account for only 12 percent of the federal budget. Yes, their growth needs to be constrained too, but there just isn’t enough money there to make a sizeable dent in our fast-growing national debt, now $12 trillion and inexorably rising toward 90 percent of GDP if we don’t act soon. In the real world, stabilizing the debt at a sustainable level and eventually whittling it down means putting everything on the table – defense spending, taxes and entitlements.
That’s why the deal struck within the Fiscal Commission is so significant. It targets over $1 trillion in tax expenditures, like the tax exclusion for employer-paid health and scads of smaller business subsidies. To Senate conservatives like Chambliss, Coburn and Gang of Six member Mike Crapo of Idaho, these are essentially back-door spending programs administered through the tax code. And unlike many House Republicans and self-appointed tax commissar Grover Norquist, the GOP Senators don’t regard closing loopholes as tantamount to raising taxes. That brave departure from anti-tax fundamentalism is crucial to any bipartisan budget deal, because no self-respecting Democrat is going to negotiate deficit reductions on the spending side of the budget alone.
In a reciprocal show of political courage and country-first patriotism, commissioners Durbin and Kent Conrad of North Dakota signaled their willingness to entertain reforms in Social Security, notwithstanding all the overheated blather in the lefty blogosphere and cable TV land about the “cat food commission.”
According to today’s Washington Post, the Gang of Six is trying to recruit other Senators to join their center-out coalition. Let’s hope they succeed – and that President Obama enters the lists soon. Obama did the Fiscal Commission he created no favors by declining to endorse any of its recommendations. Worse, top White House aides lately have dropped hints that the administration may try to separate Social Security reform from negotiations over deficit reduction. If true, it would represent backsliding from Obama’s forthright pledges on taking office to confront Social Security’s problems.
In a recent op-ed, OMB Director Jack Lew argued that “Social Security does not cause our deficits,” and added: “Strengthening Social Security is an important, but parallel, issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. But let’s not confuse it as either the cause of or a solution to our short-term fiscal problems.”
It’s true that health care costs are a far bigger problem, but Social Security also faces a long-term spending gap that will contribute to our mounting national debt as the baby boomers retire. The fact that it’s more easily fixed than Medicare or Medicaid is no reason to put that chore off. On the contrary, Democrats’ willingness to get serious about entitlement reform is an indispensible element of any plausible bipartisan deal for getting our fiscal house in order. It’s also the best way to take the heat off domestic programs, including progressive investments in education, infrastructure and social mobility that Democrats rightly defend.
If Durbin, the Democrats’ Senate whip, understands this, then surely President Obama does as well. His reticence on the specifics of a bipartisan budget deal may be purely a matter of tactics, but Durbin, and the Gang of Six, deserve his unequivocal support.
It’s not exactly Sophie’s choice, but you have to admit there’s something a little poignant about Mitt Romney’s dilemma. To win the GOP nomination for president, he’s being forced by Tea Party types to distance himself from his greatest public achievement – making Massachusetts the first state in the union to achieve universal health care.
With House Republicans on a slash and burn mission to cut federal spending, an agency on the chopping block is the Corporation for National and Community Service and the AmeriCorps programs it operates.
As an unregenerate liberal interventionist, I believe America should aid Libyan rebels fighting to rid their country of Muammar Qaddafi. But for all the attention a no fly zone has received, there are better ways to even the odds in this so far unequal contest.
Pew has some 
From Tunisia to Egypt to Libya, as governments in countries continue to teeter and fall, the voice of a new generation bolstered by the internet is opening doors for democracy. But though the celebrations in the town squares of Tahrir and Mohammad Bouazizi are still fresh, brutal crackdowns in Iran, Libya, and Bahrain show how fragile the call for democracy is – and why technology alone can’t sustain democratic revolution.
Why is Florida’s rookie Republican Gov. Rick Scott hell-bent on rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funds for a Tampa-Orlando high-speed railway? Is it because his argument that Florida taxpayers would be “on the hook” for cost overruns was about to be exposed as a bunch of hooey?
Last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill revealed not just technological problems, but policy gaps as well. Among the most notable of these gaps is the federal limit on liability for oil spills, set at $75 million for offshore facilities. This is three or four orders of magnitude smaller than the damages associated with a major offshore spill like Deepwater Horizon, whose damages are estimated in the tens of billions. Firms that cause more damage than the limit aren’t liable, at least not under federal law. It is only BP’s decision to waive this limit that has kept it from being a much larger problem.
One of the salient realities of politics is that much of the contention revolves around efforts to get the news media and the public to focus on events that reinforce one group’s point of view over others. There are, of course, front-and-center national and international news developments that literally command attention. But when it comes to, say, a noisy dispute over a budget in a medium-sized state, you’d normally see one side or the other trying to “nationalize” the event to gain external allies.
A rift seems to have opened between the Obama administration and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the ever-sensitive topic of North Korea. Sen. Kerry convened a hearing today on the subject, and previewed