The Great Debate

There are glimmers of light in our battle to put America’s finances in order. New hope for a long-term budget deal has come in the form of two ideas, both from outside Congress, that many of our elected officials have embraced:“No Budget, No Pay” and “No Deal, No Break.”

The critical matter now is whether these two initiatives will lead to serious negotiations, or just be rhetorical weapons in Washington’s political warfare.

Both these campaigns speak to substantive needs we have as a nation. “No Budget, No Pay” is a signature campaign of No Labels, a national coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents advocating that Washington should focus on progress not partisanship. I am a co-founder of this group.

“No Deal, No Break” is a nonpartisan effort supported by my organization, the Comeback American Initiative, and others. It is pushing for Congress to stay in session until a deal is reached.

“No Budget, No Pay” is intended to pressure our politicians by withholding their salaries if they don’t pass a timely budget. Federal law spells out that Congress should pass a budget by April 15 each year. Yet the Senate has not passed a budget in four years, and Congress has not passed a budget and related spending bills on time in 15 years.

President Barack Obama stirred with an unexpectedly powerful inaugural address – a second effort that far surpassed his first. He summoned great themes of American history to argue cogently for his second-term agenda. Now he has a chance to deliver a State of the Union address that improves on those of his first term, too.

The key to success? Presidents still have the power of surprise. Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “I am like a cat. I make a quick stroke, and then I relax.” As in his inaugural, Obama should surprise us – this time with new policies and sharp specificity. On the budget, democracy reform and immigration, the president stands well positioned.

Forget the Super Bowl, or even the Oscars. For us policy wonks and ex-speechwriters, this is the biggest event – the time to crack open a beer, microwave the Buffalo chicken wings and settle down in front of the TV for a siege of viewing.

We can only hope the final presidential debate Monday provides less heat and more light than the previous two. Especially with regard to fiscal matters, the debates have so far not provided the substance and solutions that voters need and deserve to hear.

Our nation’s escalating deficits and debt represent the biggest threat to our national security, as I said in early 2007. Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said much the same in 2010. So the topic of the third debate, foreign policy and national security, needs to include a frank discussion of fiscal issues.

For, as our economy weakens, so does our position in the world. It will eventually compromise both our national security and domestic tranquility if not effectively addressed. Both our allies and adversaries recognize this, and we need to take action.

As America’s national leaders get ready to tackle the country’s serious challenges, they will need solid information on which to base their decisions.

Unfortunately, with its recent vote to defund the American Community Survey, the U.S. House of Representatives has undercut the most dependable source of information they should be relying upon.

The House voted to cut all funding for the Census Bureau’s annual collection of data on the economic, demographic and housing characteristics of U.S. households. Backers of the plan called the annual survey of 3 million random households “unconstitutional” and “an invasion of privacy” and balked at the relatively modest price tag of $2.4 billion a decade. This action, along with a current move in the Senate to enact “compromise” legislation that would make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary, works against laudable efforts by Congress to eliminate ineffective programs and curtail government waste.

There is something oddly retro about Mitt Romney. He appears to have sprung from a nostalgic fifties “Hairspray” world where women sported beehives and cars had fins. Nor has his economic thinking kept up with the times. Although he backed Obama’s $787 billion-dollar Keynesian stimulus, as soon as the borrowers’ remorse that sparked the Tea Party took hold, he turned on a dime and embraced austerity and paying off the national debt.

As he declares on his website: “The only recipe for fiscal health and a thriving private economy is a government that spends within its means.” He signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge that will tie his hands if he makes it to the White House. Not trusting himself, perhaps, to remain fiscally continent, he favors an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, obliging Congress to put balancing the budget before all other measures. He would cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, a feat that would entail about $500 billion in cuts. On day one of his presidency, he says he would send Congress a bill that would cut non-security discretionary spending by 5 percent.

His proposed economies include (his estimates in parentheses): repealing Obama’s healthcare plan ($95 billion); privatizing Amtrak ($1.6 billion); reducing federal payments to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corporation ($600 million); eliminating family planning subsidies ($300 million); cutting foreign aid ($100 million); capping Medicaid (more than $100 billion); replacing only half those who leave the federal workforce ($4 billion); ending the Davis-Bacon Act ($11 billion) and paying federal employees lower wages ($47 billion); and that old elusive crowd-pleaser, reducing waste and fraud ($60 billion).

It was the Welsh sage Alan Watkins who remarked that a budget that looked good the day it was delivered to the British Parliament was sure to look terrible a week later, and vice versa. The avalanche of new information dumped by the Treasury is simply too much to grasp at a single sitting, and governments tend to bury bad news in a welter of statistics. And so it proved with finance minister George Osborne’s budget served up last week.

The immediate headlines stressed that rich Brits would pay less income tax – down from 50 percent to 45 percent – but it only took a day before even traditional Conservative cheerleaders like the Daily Mail were condemning Osborne for funding tax breaks for bankers and billionaires by stealing from those living in retirement. The paper’s cover screamed: “Osborne picks the pockets of pensioners.”

Osborne insists he is sticking to his “Plan A” to reduce the public deficit by sharply cutting state spending by 25 percent over the five-year parliament and imposing severe austerity. Because he believes his “Plan A” is on target, all he needed was a touch on the tiller. He therefore designed his budget to be fiscally neutral – that is, for every tax cut there was a corresponding tax increase. He put up tobacco and alcohol duties and sliced a little off corporation tax.

This week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released what amounts to the most substantive roadmap for fiscal policy that any Republican is likely to offer in 2012. Many political pundits and policy analysts, especially those on the left, are eager to dig into the details to alert the public about the potential (negative) impacts of a budget that slices off $5 trillion in total federal spending compared with the plan offered by President Obama in February.

Providing 100 pages of budget and policy detail in an election year is considered political suicide by many. Democrats fully intend to use the plan to campaign against Republicans in the fall, hoping to gain an advantage not only in select House or Senate races but also in the presidential contest.

Ryan, though, sees this as the only responsible path forward: So what if his plan won’t get enacted into law this year. Should Ryan’s House colleagues, or the candidates for president, avoid taking a detailed position on our country’s fiscal future? As Ryan explains: “If we simply operate based on political fear, nothing is ever going to get done.”

One aspect of Paul Ryan’s new budget that hasn’t drawn much attention is that it is a big love letter to the Pentagon. Ryan rejects the idea that budgetary pressures should have any effect on defense spending, which he argues should be dictated purely by “strategic” calculations. Among other things, the Ryan budget would reverse $55 billion in defense cuts mandated for 2013 by the “trigger” agreed to in last year’s budget ceiling deal – and cut this same amount from domestic programs instead.

Ryan says we shouldn’t worry about military spending, even amid a supposed fiscal emergency, because such outlays are “shrinking as a share of government spending and as a share of the national economy.” America may have a spending problem, Ryan and the House Budget Committee believe, but the Pentagon is not part of that problem: “This category of spending is clearly not driving the unsustainable fiscal trajectory that is threatening the nation’s future.”

That’s strange to hear, since soaring security costs since 9/11 have been a key driver of deficits – accounting for about $1.4 trillion in new debt since 2001 by one widely cited non-partisan estimate. And, looking ahead, it’s hard to see a path to fiscal discipline that doesn’t include sharp cuts to the defense budget, which constitutes over half of all discretionary federal spending.

The state of the union, fiscally speaking, is perilous. Despite record deficits and dire warnings from Europe as to the consequences of sustained fiscal imbalance, our leaders have been unable to find common ground. The Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010, the Gang of Six last summer and the misnamed Super Committee of this past fall were all bipartisan efforts to cut through the Gordian knot of budgetary gridlock. And all of them failed. Miserably.

Yet despite these failures, Congress now has the opportunity to move us onto a path toward prompt national consensus on fiscal reform. Congressional leaders are this week debating legislation to extend the payroll tax cut. If they are smart, they will include in that bill a small, but important, provision that grants the winner of the 2012 presidential election something called fast-track authority. This authority would allow the president — whoever he is — to submit fiscal reform legislation for an up-or-down vote in both the House and Senate on Jan. 21, 2013, the day after Inauguration Day. Indeed, fast-track authority would be a worthy quid pro quo for members of Congress reluctant to sign off on extending the payroll tax cut without some assurance of future progress on deficit reduction.

What’s promising about this proposal is not just what fast-track authority might deliver in 2013, but what its very existence could do to the presidential race. With fast-track authority granted, President Obama and his Republican challenger could each be expected to put forward during the presidential race a coherent and credible plan to move toward a balanced budget.

By David Callahan

The views expressed are his own.

At a time when the U.S. government needs every dollar of revenue it can get, alarm bells should be sounding in Washington about a new IRS study showing that the Treasury is losing a fortune to tax evasion.

The study, released last Friday, found that the government missed out on $385 billion in uncollected taxes in 2006, the most recent year for which the IRS has complete data. If we extrapolate the IRS’s assumption that the U.S. government only collects about 85 percent of total tax liabilities, the revenue lost by the Treasury in the past decade exceeds $3 trillion.

That is serious money–nearly equal to all the new federal debt incurred during the Bush years. And without tougher action against tax cheats, the U.S. government stands to lose trillions more over the next decade.