In this debt-limit game of musical chairs, the music has stopped and it’s time to grab a seat. The only one available is the deal worked out by congressional leaders and the Obama administration over the weekend. It is not a solution to our nation’s fiscal problems and is far from the “grand bargain” needed to put us on a sustainable path. However, a debt-limit deal needs to get done. This one at least avoids a self-inflicted wound caused by the government’s defaulting on its obligations, and it gives proponents of a grand bargain another turn at bat.

The main flaw in the agreement is that it reflects the continued refusal of our political leaders to confront fiscal reality. Once again, they are leading with discretionary spending cuts while leaving the biggest problems -- entitlement and tax reform -- for another day.

If this is what they have to do to pass a debt limit increase, so be it. But no one should pretend that they have solved anything other than an artificial political crisis. The fundamental fiscal crisis is pretty much unchanged.

A positive element is the proposed special congressional committee charged with finding deficit reductions beyond the initial trillion-dollar down payment. The committee is the only aspect of the agreement that...

The biggest sticking point in the debt-limit talks has been the disagreement over tax policy. President Obama has been encouraged by his fiscal commission to insist that higher revenues be part of any major deficit-reduction deal -- and to recommend that much of the revenue increase should come from broadening the tax base by reducing "tax expenditures." Although Republicans are coming around to the idea that tax expenditures are just subsidies run through the tax code, many of their leaders stand firm on the position that revenues as a share of the economy not rise from current policy.

While President Obama and other Democrats want revenue increases, they don’t want any changes that would raise taxes on middle class or lower-income households, arguing that such taxes would be overly burdensome and would harm the economic recovery. Meanwhile, Republicans only want reduced tax expenditures to pay for cuts in marginal tax rates, asserting that they would be the path to stronger economic growth and in turn higher revenues.

So both sides are reluctant to change their tax-cutting ways, and they continue to have their own great expectations for tax cuts. But tax cuts don’t always live up to such expectations,...

The punch line of an old joke aptly describes the status of budget negotiations in Washington: you can’t get there from here. It’s not the “there” that is the problem; it’s the “here.”

Broad bipartisan consensus exists on two points. The first is that the debt limit must soon be raised to avoid a default in one form or another. The second is that current fiscal policy cannot be sustained. Missing from the equation is any solid evidence that political leaders are prepared to do what is necessary to solve either problem.

Republicans have chained themselves to a rigid negotiating position, insisting that there can be no tax increase regardless of the need or on whom the burden would fall. They argue that even a deficit reduction plan heavily tilted toward spending cuts, such as the framework recommended by the President’s bipartisan fiscal commission (Bowles-Simpson), must be rejected outright.

Democrats say they are more reasonable because they believe that everything -- spending cuts and tax increases -- should be “on the table.” However, they have unanimously rejected four budget plans in the Senate, including the President’s official budget, without proposing anything of their own. They are clearly content to let the House Republican budget twist slowly in the wind while maintaining the safety of silence...

Making A Difference
   
My fellow student T.J Leach and I, Alex Hall, are students of George Nye’s Business and Economics class at Lake Region High School in Naples, Maine.  We both grew up in the area, which is about one hour north of Portland. The people who live year-round in Naples are generally of a lower to middle financial status, so we have grown up being aware of the importance of money in our day to day lives. We decided to create a video presentation to inform the public about the national debt. We went with our class out to local stores and interviewed random people. We had a specific set of questions that challenged them to think about what they know about our nation’s debt.  After compiling all of the information, we put it into a video to show to the entire school during an assembly.

The idea of making the video came up in our Economics class. We had to come up with something that would make people aware of the crisis we are in, while also making it possible for other people to look at the information we had collected. At first we thought about creating a simple presentation and then showing it to just our class. Once we looked at the numbers we were dealing with, we realized how much larger is the problem America faces today. So we wanted to do...