Obama names deficit commission
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President Obama on Thursday created a commission to study the growing U.S. deficit, an advisory panel with far less power than the version rejected by Congress.
Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Clinton, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson were named to head the body. As White House chief of staff from 1996 to 998, Bowles was involved in brokering the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Simpson was a senator from Wyoming from 1979 to 1997.
“There is no doubt we are going to have to also address the long-term quandary of a government that routinely and extravagantly spends more than it takes in,” Obama said in televised remarks.
“Federal debt has exploded, the trajectory is clear and it is disturbing, but the politics of dealing with chronic deficits is fraught with hard choices and therefore it is treacherous to office-holders here in Washington,” Obama said.
Obama said the panel will “attempt the impossible” in dealing with deficit issues. The problems ““won’t be solved overnight,” Obama said, but the panel is needed to put “America on the path to fiscal responsibility.”
Obama will name four more members to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. GOP and Democratic congressional leaders will each name six others for a total of 18, including the chairmen. Fourteen votes are needed for recommendations to be sent to Congress by Dec. 1.
The commission will study ways of dealing with the deficit, expected to reach a record of nearly $1.6 trillion in the current fiscal year, and is charged with making recommendations that would put the budget in primary balance by 2015.
Its report will be advisory, and it is unclear if any of its recommendations will ever be implemented. In the version of the panel rejected by the Senate, recommendations would have forced a legislative vote.
Even though the bill to create the panel had both Republican and Democratic sponsors, the Senate refused to go along, partly out of fears that it would lose control of the process. The panel’s recommendations could include spending cuts and tax increases, both hot political issues.
Obama has used the failure of that bipartisan bill as an example of the type of political gridlock caused by the hyper-partisan atmosphere permeating Washington.
Polls show voter unhappiness with the growing federal debt and deficits, giving Republicans an issue in the midterm election year.
-- Michael Muskal
Twitter.com/LATimesmuskal
