The Everything Commission
Can Congress and the president get the fiscal house in order -- or must that job be outsourced?

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

THE POLITICAL system is proving itself incapable of addressing hard budgetary questions even as the time to act grows shorter. President Bush tried -- and failed -- on Social Security, the easiest of the three big entitlement programs to "fix." His efforts on tax reform fizzled -- though less spectacularly, since the president never put his energy into the issue in the first place. Congress had such a hard time agreeing on small cuts in Medicare and Medicaid last year that it abandoned any pretense of trying again this time around. And Mr. Bush's proposal for a bipartisan commission to examine the costly health-care programs has foundered as Democrats balked at signing up for any examination that put taxes off the table.

Into this standoff comes Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) with a proposal for a base-closure-style commission to beat all commissions. It would look at the tax code and the array of entitlement programs and produce a set of recommendations, decided by a two-thirds vote, to put them on a fiscally sustainable course. Its 15 members would be appointed by the president (three members) and the congressional leadership (three each for the House and Senate majority and minority leaders). Its recommendations would come before Congress for an up-or-down vote, although the president or either chamber's budget committee would also be able to submit alternatives.

Mr. Wolf's proposal is laudable in some ways, disturbing in others. The congressman, who supported all of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, deserves credit for being explicitly willing to put tax increases on the table. New revenue is a necessary part of any solution, a reality Mr. Bush and his fellow tax-cutters have been unwilling to acknowledge. As Mr. Wolf said in announcing his plan last week, "Given the enormity of the challenge, the commission needs to be able to look at every component of our fiscal policy to fairly assess where we stand and how we can best move toward a sound fiscal future."

Mr. Wolf's big-picture approach also has much to recommend it. These issues are complex on their own but they are also interrelated, with trade-offs to be made that can't be addressed if each program is considered individually. Chipping away problem by problem might be easier -- though even that approach has proved all but impossible -- but it would avoid an urgently needed discussion of national priorities.

What gives us pause is the acknowledgment, implicit in Mr. Wolf's base-closing-commission approach, that the political system is so broken it must outsource these fundamental policy questions. Perhaps that is true; certainly, the evidence supports this gloomy assessment. But rewriting the tax code, restructuring Social Security and reshaping government-paid health care are not parochial matters like military bases that call for a special process to overcome elected officials' geographic and political self-interest. They are the bedrock questions of government and the job of elected officials, who should look at Mr. Wolf's proposal and feel embarrassed that it has come to this.