The choices don’t get easier through the next two years, they get tougher. Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the nonpartisan budget watchdog group Concord Coalition, put it this way: “Few candidates have had anything useful to say about realistic fiscal solutions. To the contrary, many new members of Congress will have been elected on pledges to forswear the very things that will be needed: spending cuts in popular entitlement programs and defense, tax increases and, most of all, compromise.”