President Obama deserves credit for putting Medicare and Medicaid on the table for deficit-reduction efforts and for encouraging the new super committee to exceed its assigned goal. But the President’s  new proposals to that panel, released today, fall short of comprehensive structural reform in health care and tax policy, and his decision to leave Social Security out of the plan is disappointing as well.

Amid growing concerns about a double-dip recession, the administration has focused this month largely on short-term measures to support the economy. These measures should not preclude putting long-term deficit reduction plans in place, and in fact such plans can dramatically boost the effectiveness of the short-term initiatives.

So Obama’s suggestion that Washington proceed on both the short- and long-term fronts is welcome.  So is his willingness to discuss changes in Medicare and Medicaid, two of the federal government’s largest and most rapidly growing programs. Significant changes will be needed in those programs  if the nation is to have any hope of eventually putting itself on a more responsible and sustainable fiscal course.

The proposals to change other mandatory spending programs, such as cutting agriculture subsidies and increased cost-sharing in...

Members of the new Congressional Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction will have a threshold decision to make: Do they want to take their mandate seriously?

If the answer is yes, they will likely have to make decisions in the public interest that will not sit well with the party leaders who appointed them. If the answer is no, they will heighten public frustration with the political process and risk deep automatic cuts in programs many of them care about.

Which should it be?

The answer is obvious. In hard times, the national interest always tops narrow or partisan concerns. And yet, pressure on members of the committee to fiercely protect the interests of favored constituencies will be enormous. It has already begun in the form of intense lobbying of party leaders to only appoint “safe” members who are firmly opposed to compromise. 

Arrayed against this pressure is the stark reality that we can’t fund future spending commitments with today’s level of taxation. Unless someone steps up to the challenge of reconciling the competing values and needs of a diverse society, our nation will suffer the consequences -- not just within some artificial 10-year “budget window,” but for decades to come. 

Failure to confront this challenge got us into the fiscal ditch we’re in. The Joint Committee has...

The partisan vortex in Washington is now so strong that it threatens to swallow all rational thought.

As the nation rushes closer to default, politicians are rushing to their respective partisan corners. At times they truly seem more interested in blaming each other for causing a crisis than they are with preventing a crisis from happening. It is little wonder that credit ratings agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have repeatedly questioned whether U.S. Treasury bonds can maintain their AAA status.  The scenario they fear, which becomes more likely by the day, is not so much that the U.S. can’t pay its bills but that it will refuse to do so.

For a brief time last week, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner appeared ready to challenge their respective political bases. Hopes were raised for a “big deal” that would include essential compromises on popular entitlement programs and tax breaks to reduce the deficit by roughly $4 trillion over 10 years. It was a good idea, but it didn’t last long.

Instead of looking at what the nation might gain in fiscal sustainability, politicians on both sides looked with horror at what they might lose in terms of partisan finger-pointing. A big deal would mean that Republicans could no longer accuse Democrats of trying to kill the economy with...

The punch line of an old joke aptly describes the status of budget negotiations in Washington: you can’t get there from here. It’s not the “there” that is the problem; it’s the “here.”

Broad bipartisan consensus exists on two points. The first is that the debt limit must soon be raised to avoid a default in one form or another. The second is that current fiscal policy cannot be sustained. Missing from the equation is any solid evidence that political leaders are prepared to do what is necessary to solve either problem.

Republicans have chained themselves to a rigid negotiating position, insisting that there can be no tax increase regardless of the need or on whom the burden would fall. They argue that even a deficit reduction plan heavily tilted toward spending cuts, such as the framework recommended by the President’s bipartisan fiscal commission (Bowles-Simpson), must be rejected outright.

Democrats say they are more reasonable because they believe that everything -- spending cuts and tax increases -- should be “on the table.” However, they have unanimously rejected four budget plans in the Senate, including the President’s official budget, without proposing anything of their own. They are clearly content to let the House Republican budget twist slowly in the wind while maintaining the safety of silence...