President Obama handed his bipartisan fiscal commission two very ambitious assignments: Find ways to balance the budget excluding interest payments by 2015 and to “meaningfully improve” the long-term fiscal outlook.
President Obama handed his bipartisan fiscal commission two very ambitious assignments: Find ways to balance the budget excluding interest payments by 2015 and to “meaningfully improve” the long-term fiscal outlook.
Simply determining which baseline to use in assessing the required deficit reduction in 2015 would get commission members bogged down. They can’t know what it would take to reach that goal before they know what actions Congress will take this year.
Concentrating on the long-term goal, however, the commission might be able to find some common ground on issues such as reforming Social Security, curbing cost increases in Medicare and Medicaid, and improving the tax code.