As a former head of three federal agencies and a public trustee of Social Security and Medicare, I have learned that the process that one employs is critically important when transformational changes are needed. It has also led me to the conclusion that the “regular order” in Congress is broken and that achieving progress on multiple fronts within a relatively short time frame is not possible on a piecemeal basis.
What does this mean? The president and the Congress need to work together to establish a “Fiscal Future Commission” (or Task Force) that, unlike most Washington commissions, would be designed to accelerate action and get the ball across the goal line rather than punt it down the field. Ideally, this commission would be created by statute to ensure buy-in from both the Congress and the president. It should include selected congressional members and administration and non-governmental officials. It should engage the American people outside Washington’s Beltway while also leveraging digital technology and the Web. After engaging the public and key stakeholders, it would make a range of budget control, entitlement, other spending and tax reform recommendations that would be subject to an “up or down” vote in Congress, with limitations on amendments so they would not undercut the fiscal “bottom line” of the commission’s recommendations.
With all due respect to someone Dr. Harmon admires, I can’t see an advantage to setting up a commission to do the work that we elect legislators to do. The failure to reach consensus in these past two weeks should be viewed as an indication that the current proposal is a bad idea.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to Keynesian economics, but if the Democrats were to offer a serious Keynesian stimulus package, I think it would pass with some Republican votes. Let them stand down from this mess they’ve made and start over with a well-crafted package on which debate is allowed and whose provisions are out in the open, and they might get better response.
Katherine, I agree with open provisional debate, but right now we can’t even make the recipients of the first 300B reveal what they did with the handout. And until they do I would rather have Congress use the remainder to keep some people employed even if only to improve our road sysems and upgrade some of our school buildings. Somehow my Dad got through the Great Depression doing just exactly that until industry got back on it’s feet, WITHOUT a bailout scheme.
More will undoubtedly occur, and we need to learn from past mistakes to increase the chance of future success.
…The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), for example, has been a major disappointment. This should not be surprising since it was enacted in a crisis atmosphere
And we’re still in a crisis atmosphere. We’re probably going to make the same mistake again because it’s politically viable.
The president and the Congress need to work together to establish a “Fiscal Future Commission” (or Task Force) that, unlike most Washington commissions, would be designed to accelerate action and get the ball across the goal line rather than punt it down the field….We can and must come to grips with our current and structural fiscal challenges.
We must, but we won’t. Dealing with the looming entitlement and debt problem has been ignored forever, and it’s probably too late now. As a nation, we simply don’t have the collective ability to plan long-term; the short term interests always win out, and that will continue until fiscal contingencies make it impossible to move forward. I think we’ll default on our debt before we reduce entitlements or restrain deficit spending, because we’re simply not afraid of the consequences (we should be, but we aren’t.)
I wonder if the long term lesson is that we need to make some major structural changes in the way our nation makes decisions. How is it that a great nation can so thoroughly trash itself fiscally? Was there any system of government that would have prevented it?
We listened to an address by David Walker as Comptroller, on PBS in December 2007, and it seemed clear then that he might be the only person in any position to understand the problems who was actually speaking with clarity about the fact that there were major fiscal problems looming – really like a voice in the wilderness, I remember thinking at the time.