Giving up isn’t an option

Published 3:32 pm Monday, November 21, 2011

Big and bold were what was needed from the supercommittee. In the end, it couldn’t even produce small and timid.

That doesn’t mean Congress and the White House can stop trying.

The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction raised a white flag Monday, having failed its assignment to recommend $1.2 trillion in patches to slow the federal budget deficit’s growth over the next decade. Even before Monday’s announcement, the finger-pointing had commenced.

Democrats on the bipartisan congressional panel wouldn’t give enough on spending cuts and wanted too much in tax increases, Republicans charged. Republicans held out for no tax increases until the eleventh hour, Democrats retorted, and then came up with a proposal that didn’t go nearly far enough.

Still, unlike other recent debates in Congress, it appears this wasn’t a completely futile exercise.

Democrats did appear to give significant ground on entitlement spending. The New York Times reported they proposed up to $500 billion in Medicare savings, and using a lower measure of inflation to reduce annual adjustments in Social Security benefits. Both would have elicited howls from the left.

Republicans on the supercommittee may not have given a lot of ground on taxes — indeed, the $300 billion revenue proposal by GOP Sen. Pat Toomey required Democrats to agree to make the 10-year-old Bush tax cuts permanent — but sizeable groups of Republicans in the House and Senate did agree to support tax hikes as part of a larger deficit-cutting plan.

Forty House Republicans — that’s 1 of 6 — broke with GOP orthodoxy this month by signing a letter urging the supercommittee to consider all options for raising revenue. Last week, a bipartisan group of 147 representatives and senators joined in a “Go Big Coalition” pushing for a deficit-reduction plan in the neighborhood of $4 trillion over 10 years.

That’s about what the bipartisan panel appointed by President Obama had recommended earlier. It’s the number the president and House Speaker John Boehner reportedly were aiming for in discussions that broke off over the summer. It’s a significant number, but against a national debt that’s grown to $15 trillion, $4 trillion can really only be considered a down payment.

Some pundits have argued that we’ll remain in stalemate until voters sort out the nation’s priorities in next year’s elections. That’s more than a little naive. No matter which party ends up in the White House or in control of Congress, the other will retain ample leverage — especially in the Senate, where a 60 percent supermajority is required to pass anything remotely controversial.

Our politics aren’t likely to be any less polarized a year from now. Leaders who have fundamental disagreements are going to have to find common ground and act. They’ve made some progress. Now they must build on it.

If they don’t, just look to Europe to see what our economic future may hold.