Debt Panel Pauses Until After Elections
By JACKIE CALMES
NYT
WASHINGTON — The bipartisan debt-reduction commission that President Obama created eight months ago will begin meeting privately soon after Tuesday’s elections, with just three weeks to try to agree on cutbacks to Americans’ favorite tax breaks and benefit programs.
The group, which has a Dec. 1 deadline for recommending how to reduce the annual deficits swelling the federal debt, purposely has done little to date beyond five public hearings, and it has decided nothing lest any decisions leak and blow up in the flammable mix of a campaign year with control of Congress in the balance.
Amid that partisan backdrop, people in both parties say they have been surprised that the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform reached an early consensus to put all three major budget parts on the table: taxes, annual spending for domestic and military programs, and the entitlement benefit programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Still, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to changes in benefits, expectations are low that any plan can get the 14-vote supermajority required to send it to Congress for a vote in December. Advocates’ best hope seems to be that the co-chairmen — Erskine B. Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system and a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader from Wyoming — can negotiate a package that attracts a sizable minority of the 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans and provides a framework for future bipartisan action.
(More here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON — The bipartisan debt-reduction commission that President Obama created eight months ago will begin meeting privately soon after Tuesday’s elections, with just three weeks to try to agree on cutbacks to Americans’ favorite tax breaks and benefit programs.
The group, which has a Dec. 1 deadline for recommending how to reduce the annual deficits swelling the federal debt, purposely has done little to date beyond five public hearings, and it has decided nothing lest any decisions leak and blow up in the flammable mix of a campaign year with control of Congress in the balance.
Amid that partisan backdrop, people in both parties say they have been surprised that the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform reached an early consensus to put all three major budget parts on the table: taxes, annual spending for domestic and military programs, and the entitlement benefit programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Still, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to changes in benefits, expectations are low that any plan can get the 14-vote supermajority required to send it to Congress for a vote in December. Advocates’ best hope seems to be that the co-chairmen — Erskine B. Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system and a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader from Wyoming — can negotiate a package that attracts a sizable minority of the 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans and provides a framework for future bipartisan action.
(More here.)
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