Erskine Bowles (D) and Alan Simpson (R) - slash spending, raise taxes

[scandal 951]

BEST would be for Congressional leaders to sit down together and address BOTH spending cuts AND tax increases in a bipartisan fashion, and put something in this year's budget that takes real steps on both.

GOOD would be for Congress to appoint its own bipartisan commission, let them sit around chewing the fat for a year, but when they reconvene have their report be binding, and brought for immediate vote.

LESS GOOD would be a non-binding congressional commission.

BETTER THAN NOTHING would be a non-binding commission that both parties in Congress are already telegraphing they will ignore (that's what we have here).

NOTHING would be nothing.

Well, I guess we're getting better than nothing.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...cit-panel_N.htm

Obama sets up panel to tackle debt

President Obama created an 18-member fiscal commission Thursday charged with coming up with ideas to begin erasing $14.3 trillion in government red ink.

"These are tough times, and we can't keep spending like they're not," Obama said.

The panel will be headed by Democrat Erskine Bowles, a former White House chief of staff, and Republican Alan Simpson, a retired Wyoming senator. The panel will have 16 more members: four appointed by Obama, and six each by congressional Democrats and Republicans.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will spend most of the year coming up with ways to slash the $1.6 trillion federal budget deficit and $14.3 trillion national debt. It needs at least 14 of 18 "yes" votes to send any recommendations to Congress.

Obama said the "quandary" of a government that routinely spends way more than it takes in must be addressed. When he took office last year, he said, the ratio was 25% of gross domestic product spent, 16% raised in taxes.

He said the panel has a "thankless task" as he hailed the two men who will take it on. Obama singled out Simpson, a longtime advocate of fiscal discipline, as being "flinty" or unyielding.

"If you look in the dictionary, it says 'flinty' and then it's got Simpson's picture," the president said.

Bowles, as President Clinton's chief of staff, helped broker the 1997 deficit reduction law that was followed by four years of budget surpluses.

The goal of the panel is to make recommendations that may require a mix of tax increases and spending cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars to bring the budget deficit down to 3% of the economy by 2015. That would put the budget in balance except for payments on debt.

"Everything's on the table, that's how this thing's going to work," Obama said.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the commission should emphasize spending cuts, not tax increases.

"After trillions in new and proposed spending, Americans know our problem is not that we tax too little, but that Washington spends too much — that should be the focus of this commission," McConnell said in a statement.

The commission's recommendations are due Dec. 1, after the congressional elections. Even then, lawmakers may be able to avoid having to take a public stand on measures such as tax increases or cuts to popular programs because Obama's executive order creating the panel can't force Congress to vote on its recommendations.

The panel is Obama's second choice.

He supported a Senate proposal by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., that would have required lawmakers to vote on recommendations from such a commission but was defeated in late January.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

It's kicking the can down the road, but watch out for Alan Simpson, who currently has a fatwa set on him by the AARP.

iFEAqy8GbnA

[Danno 1,228]

The problem with this whole concepts is:

It's like you took a mortgage out on this huge house you could not afford and some "panel" told you, you need a second source of income (taxes) and to cut down on your light bill.

We have programs we can never afford and the MOrtgage bill is on the way.

Cutting down here and there will not fix the problem.

(are States going to do the same cop-out with their exploding Debt......farm-out the hard choices?)

Anyway, we already pay our Senators and Congressmen to do these tasks, if the job is too "uncomfortable" for them, lets replace them.

This is all together different than the "Base Closing" panel.

[scandal 951]

It's kicking the can down the road, but watch out for Alan Simpson, who currently has a fatwa set on him by the AARP.

Well, the knives are out from the Left and the Right. I take that as a good sign.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/02/18/l...mp;mod=washwire

Left and Right Fire at Alan Simpson

By John D. McKinnon

President Barack Obama on Thursday introduced former Sen. Alan Simpson – co-chairman of his new deficit-reduction commission – as a “flinty Wyoming truth-teller.” In fact, “if you look in the dictionary it says `flinty,’ and then it’s got Simpson’s picture,” Obama said.

Despite the chief executive’s endorsement, Simpson already was drawing fire from both the right and the left, even before his appointment became official.

In a blog post, Roger Hickey of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future termed Simpson’s appointment a “very bad sign.” As a senator, Simpson “hated defenders of Social Security and Medicare so much that he tried… to attack and intimidate AARP [a seniors advocacy group], holding hearings that could have affected the senior groups tax status,” Hickey wrote.

“All over Washington today organizations that care about the elderly are warning that this commission could easily turn into a `runaway train’ that could do great damage to Social Security and Medicare,” Hickey continued. “The appointment of Alan Simpson gives no relief to those concerns.”

The conservative Americans for Tax Reform was even tougher, arguing that Simpson in past budget negotiations has been fooled by Democratic promises of spending cuts that later failed to materialize.

“While a U.S. Senator, Simpson voted for two `bipartisan deals’ which had real tax increases and phony spending cuts,” ATR said in a release. “The first was the 1982 `TEFRA’ bill which promised $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes. The second was the 1990 `Read My Lips’ deal struck at Andrews Air Force Base, which promised $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes. In both cases, every penny of the tax hikes went through. Also in each case, the spending restraint never materialized.”

Simpson’s co-chairman will be Erskine Bowles, the former Clinton White House chief of staff and currently president of the University of North Carolina. Bowles was drawing less attention on Thursday, although some liberals are skeptical of the depth of his commitment to Social Security and other entitlements. Bowles shepherded the 1997 balanced-budget agreement that helped produce federal surpluses for a few years.

And where in the dictionary does Bowles show up? a reporter asked as the event ended. “Smart,” Obama said.