In a new blog post, a frustrated Robert Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, compares the recent political squabbling over a small slice of the federal budget to a back-seat fight by the Three Stooges in a car heading for a cliff.
Bixby says Congress and President Obama need to quickly wrap up this year’s budget and move on to serious discussions about comprehensive, long-term budget reforms. While Capitol Hill is engaged in brinksmanship and a possible government shutdown, the bipartisan Concord Coalition is focused on the big, difficult reforms proposed earlier this year by the president’s fiscal commission.
Here’s a part of what Bixby had to say:
“The long-awaited ‘adult conversation’ has not yet begun.
“Very few dispute the fact that we’re on an unsustainable fiscal path. Yet too few seem willing to take the mountain of official and unofficial warnings seriously enough to do anything about them.
“Indeed, they seem eager to engage in a reckless game of fiscal chicken, virtually daring the other side to do something responsible. We are left with a fierce debate over non-security appropriations that account for only 12 percent of the budget.
“That is why even tentative sprouts of reason are worth nurturing. For example, it was heartening to see 64 Senators – 32 Democrats and 32 Republicans — write to the president urging him to engage in a comprehensive approach to deficit reduction using the framework recommended by the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.
“The … Bowles-Simpson framework and a similar proposal by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force chaired by Alice Rivlin, a Democrat, and Pete Domenici, a Republican, showed that people of differing perspectives can reach consensus if they are determined to do so for the common good.
It is exactly this approach that is needed. The president should seize the opportunity by convening a series of comprehensive bipartisan deficit-reduction talks.”
The Concord Coalition has urged Democrats to acknowledge that significant reforms of entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — are needed to eliminate long-range deficits. In addition, the group has said that the Republicans’ insistence on cutting the current budget by $61 billion would only mean an estimated 2011 fiscal year deficit of $1.64 trillion, rather than $1.7 trillion.
The Concord Coalition is a grassroots organization formed in the 1990s whose sole focus is on fiscal responsibility. Former U.S. senators Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican, and Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat, serve as Concord’s co-chairs, and former secretary of Commerce Peter Peterson serves as president.
