GET INVOLVED

Back in August of 2011, with the nation’s debt bumping up against its statutory limit and an election year looming, President Obama and Congress made a deal.

They would empower a special committee (the “super committee”) to reach a long-term budget deal worth $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction and give that deal a fast-track path to enactment. All options for cutting spending or raising revenues would be on the table.

To provide an incentive, other than simply doing the right thing, they agreed that if the super committee failed, or if Congress rejected its plan, a fallback mechanism known as “sequestration” would initiate spending cuts worth $1.2 trillion from non-exempt programs over 10 years. Half of the cuts would come from defense spending and the other half from domestic programs. The idea was not to craft rational policy but to install a back-up so arbitrary that no one would want it to go into effect.

The deal provided a grace period throughout 2013 during which a more comprehensive plan could be reached, if the super committee failed.

Here we are, 18 months later, still awaiting a “grand bargain.” The committee failed to produce a plan, nothing has been done to replace the 2011 deal, and the sequester...

In his State of the Union Address President Obama declared: “Our government shouldn’t make promises we cannot keep, but we must keep the promises we’ve already made.”

It was good applause line, but it glossed over a key point: The promises we’ve already made are the ones we cannot keep.

It is widely accepted that current fiscal policy is unsustainable. By definition, that means something has to change. Yet, if we decide that all promises must be kept, we can’t change anything without “breaking a promise.”

The dilemma for policymakers in Washington is that for years they have made unfunded promises and there is no politically convenient way to reverse this.

The first thing to do is just face up to it.

That’s why a bipartisan group of former members of Congress included this warning among their findings from their Strengthening of America forum series last fall: “We cannot put our debt on a sustainable path without reductions in the projected cost of entitlement programs, cuts in discretionary spending and higher revenues.”

Strictly speaking, any of those things could be characterized as breaking a promise.

It could be argued, for example, that...

By David M. Walker

Over the past 20 years The Concord Coalition has worked to build an impressive grassroots network. Given our nation’s poor financial condition and fiscal outlook, it is more important than ever to inspire action within that grassroots network. The next three months are critical in regards to addressing our nation’s huge and mounting fiscal challenge.

There are many fiscal issues that need to be resolved in the next 100 days, and the action, or lack of action, taken will largely determine whether a fiscal “Grand Bargain” is going to be reached in 2013. While the debt ceiling was extended until May 19, the sequester (across the board defense and other spending cuts) will take place on March 1, unless there is congressional action. Presently, it does not appear that Congress will reach a deal to avert the sequester, but even if it did, there are other key deadlines ahead. The continuing resolution that is funding all government agencies expires on March 27, and that’s not even on Congress’ radar at the moment. A joint budget resolution is supposed to be achieved by April 15, and the debt ceiling issue will come up again after that.

These issues must be dealt with, and we must quit moving from one...

In his press conference this week, President Obama suggested that policymakers only need to pass another $1.5 trillion worth of deficit reduction, on top of the $2.5 trillion already enacted, to stabilize the growth of the nation’s debt and, in his words, “finish the job.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, two well-respected fiscal policy organizations, basically agree with the President’s math, and there is nothing to quibble about in those calculations regarding stabilizing the debt.

However, that level of deficit reduction would hardly mean the “job is finished.” In fact, the whole idea that we can pinpoint a specific amount of deficit reduction necessary within a 10-year time frame can be a distraction from the fiscal sustainability conversation we need to have.

Getting caught up in exactly when the debt-GDP-ratio stabilizes, or whether we might miss that goal by a few percentage points at the end of the 10-year window, assumes a precision in economic and technical estimating that no entity actually possesses (even the CBO, whose respect and skill in these matters is second-to-none).

Our main emphasis...