President Obama’s deficit commission fell short today of the 14 votes necessary to submit its debt reduction plan to Congress for a vote. Don’t believe for a moment, however, that the commission has failed. On the contrary, co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have forged a bipartisan majority for a plan that creates the basic template for any credible effort to restore fiscal responsibility in Washington.
In pushing back against special interests and partisan polarizers, the commission has done this country a tremendous service. Whatever happens next, its members have been responsive to the solid majority of Americans who say they want to the two parties to work together to solve the nation’s toughest problems.
As the bipartisan duo of Bill Galston and David Frum noted in today’s Washington Post, a post-election Pew poll found that 55 percent of the public wants Republican leaders in Washington to work with President Obama “even if it means disappointing some groups of Republican supporters,” and even more want Obama to do the same. Independents, whose defection from Obama’s winning 2008 coalition largely accounted for the GOP’s midterm sweep, likewise express a strong preference for compromise.
To a surprising degree, that problem-solving spirit seems to have infected the deficit commission, which has been deliberating since February. Republicans don’t come any more conservative than Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, but even he is now drawing fire from anti-tax absolutists for daring to support the commission blueprint. GOP Senators Mike Crapo of Idaho and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire also endorsed the plan, while several Members from both parties in the more partisan House oppose the plan.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois broke ranks with liberals to back the plan, while centrist Sen. Max Baucus of Montana raised eyebrows in opposing it. Sounding a parochial note, Baucus criticized the commission’s sensible plan to raise gas taxes by 15 percent, saying it would “paint a big red target on rural America.”
Mostly, however, reactions to the commission’s plan have divided along predictable lines, with support concentrated in the political center and opposition hardening as you move toward either end of the spectrum. Arch-conservatives decry its emphasis on cutting tax expenditures (though we’re proud that the commission adopts a long-standing PPI proposal for a “cut-and-invest” commission to go after these loopholes and subsidies), a trillion dollar drain on federal revenues. Nor are they mollified by its significant cuts in income and corporate tax rates, or its 3-to1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases.
The left, meanwhile, is in full cry over the commission’s allegedly draconian cuts in Social Security benefits. In fact, the proposal boosts the minimum Social Security benefit for low earners, makes the benefit formula more progressive, and very gradually increases the retirement age to 69 (normal) and 64 (early) by 2075. Only today’s toddlers will be affected, and their average life expectancy probably will exceed 80 years by then. The lefty blogosphere and cable shows nonetheless have worked themselves into a hyperbolic lather about President’s Obama mean ole “catfood commission.”
This is ludicrous. The commission’s plan doesn’t actually solve America’s fiscal crisis, it merely slows spending growth to sustainable levels, and stabilizes the national debt at 60 percent of GDP by 2013. That ratio doesn’t return to 40 percent – where it was before the financial crisis hit – for 25 years. In truth the plan does not impose a pitiless austerity on America. Nor would it jeopardize economic recovery, since its changes won’t kick in until unemployment starts falling to normal levels.
Liberals are on firmer ground in arguing that the plan sets unrealistically severe limits on federal spending. It aims to get federal spending down (and revenues up) to 21 percent of GDP by 2035. Whether that is enough to meet the needs of a much grayer America, where over 20 percent of the population will be over 65, is open to doubt.
But the commission’s plan doesn’t have to be perfect. It only has to be plausible, and it more than meets that test. Although it won’t be guaranteed a vote in this Congress, there’s nothing to prevent its supporters from introducing it into the next Congress. Given the countless hours of negotiations that have shaped it, the extent to which it has absorbed the best ideas from previous fiscal reform blueprints, and its rare, bipartisan backing, the proposal could become the point of departure for next year’s debate.
That will be especially true if President Obama embraces the plan, or something very close to it. He has largely stood aloof from the commission’s deliberations, but he urgently needs to regain the political initiative after the midterm debacle. House Republicans no doubt will devise an alternative, likely drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, a commission member who opposes its plan, that emphasizes spending cuts almost exclusively. It may also include a push to repeal Obamacare. In any case, the GOP approach won’t get much Democratic support, especially now that the ranks of moderate Democrats have been drastically thinned.
In short, President Obama has an opportunity to seize the pragmatic center in the coming debate about putting America on a fiscally sustainable course. And he can thank his Commission for dealing him a very strong hand.
The simplest way to summarize the current moment in U.S. politics is to note that both Congress and the presidentially-appointed deficit commission are engaged in highly symbolic posturing in which some observers see an eventual bipartisan convergence and others see the ultimate triumph of partisanship.
If you are unemployed, or if you are one of the millions of people hanging on to cancelled employer-sponsored health insurance via COBRA, your life will take a turn for the more insecure on Sunday, thanks to Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), who wants to make a symbolic gesture about federal spending. Bunning is 
