A Plan to Cheer Up Deficit Pessimists

By JOHN HARWOOD
NYT

“The State of the Union surprised me,” Representative Paul Ryan says. Instead of urgency, the Wisconsin Republican explained in an interview, President Obama offered boilerplate on deficit reduction.

Mr. Ryan’s response to Mr. Obama’s annual address was plenty urgent, warning that a Greece-style fiscal calamity was “around the corner.” Yet the earnest new chairman of the House Budget Committee did not lay out any clearer path to solvency than the president did.

Indeed, Congressional Republicans have only begun to grapple with the limited deficit-reduction steps that they promised in 2010. Like Mr. Obama’s proposed freeze on domestic spending, their cuts would only scratch the surface of what is required to repair the nation’s long-term fiscal imbalance.

Which suggests that the quest for a durable budget fix is going nowhere fast.

(More here.)