The Future is the "Biggest Loser"
By Sean Evans, Chair and Professor of Political Science
Feb 8, 2010 -
If you want to lose weight, there is a program for you. You can exercise, follow the Atkins, Zone, or South Beach diet, take appetite suppressant drugs, have your stomach stapled, join a weight loss program like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. Or you can be like the contestants on The Biggest Loser and hire a personal trainer to help lose the weight. Yet with all of these options, people still have trouble losing weight and keeping it off. A primary reason these programs fail is that people lack or cannot maintain the commitment to change their lifestyle to lose weight.
The federal government is no different. Due to government's insatiable appetite to spend, we have a projected $1.56 trillion deficit for 2010, a $12.3 trillion debt, and projections to add $8.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. And just like people, government has all sorts of options to reduce government deficits. We have tried impoundment, mandating deficit reductions, budget caps, pay-as-you-go laws, etc. Yet whatever we try, the results fail or work for only a short period of time. In fact, the balanced budgets of the 1990s were largely built on political gridlock and the tech bubble and when the tech bubble burst followed by 9-11, the economy went into a recession and deficits followed. Republican policies under Bush made the deficit worse.
Today, we have the most recent plan to control spending and reduce the deficit: a government debt commission. Two weeks ago, the Senate defeated the Conrad-Gregg Debt Commission proposal. This proposal, similar to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, would create a bipartisan panel to decide how to reduce the deficit and Congress would have to accept or reject the proposal on an up-or-down vote.
Yet, politics killed the proposal. Six Republican Senators who had sponsored the bill or similar bills voted against it while President Obama only supported the bill to gain the support of moderate Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. Now, President Obama is creating a commission by executive order to offer suggestions to cut the deficit. However, this plan is a political fig leaf because Obama has made no serious effort to balance the budget (his budget reduces the deficit to $706 billion by 2014 but sees it rise to over $1 trillion by 2020) and Congress can ignore the panel.
However, the mere fact that Washington debates a debt commission proposal shows a failure of political leadership. In essence, Congress is saying that we have to abdicate our legislative responsibility to others because the problem is too difficult politically. Remember, the whole point of the commission is to provide political cover to Republicans who oppose raising taxes and Democrats who oppose reducing entitlements. So create a commission that makes you do both and claim that you had no choice but to take the good with the bad. Plus, a bipartisan vote removes it as a political issue in the general election.
But political cover is not enough, we need political leadership. Debt commission supporters point to the success of the Greenspan Commission to save Social Security but Robert Ball, a former Social Security Administration Commissioner, and Alan Greenspan both claim that the commission only succeeded because President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA) were committed to it and twisted arms to salvage a deal and pass the bill.
Today, the parties are more polarized than 25 years ago and few show the political courage to advocate financially responsible policies. Therefore, what makes Washington confident that Congress will show the political will and pass the commission proposals? So what Democrat will show political courage and say that Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt and propose reducing individual health care spending and Social Security benefits? What Republican will say that even if we eliminated all non-defense discretionary spending, we still have a large deficit so taxes will have to increase?
Unfortunately, the deficit and debt are real and not a TV show with a happy ending. And if we don’t seriously curb our spending ways, the “biggest loser” will be us and our children and grandchildren’s future.
Article originally appeared in the Feb. 5 edition of The Jackson Sun