My least favorite argument in deficit reduction debates is that a particular option can’t be chosen because it is too unpopular. If that criterion is strictly applied, we might as well fold our tents and wait for the inevitable fiscal crisis because we’ll never eliminate trillion-dollar deficits with “popular” options.

That message was clearly conveyed last week by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force, led by two veterans of past deficit-reduction efforts, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. Their report followed a similarly tough message from Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairs of the President’s bipartisan fiscal commission.

Elected officials have not flocked to embrace these reports and it is easy to see why. They propose spending cuts in popular programs. They challenge cherished tax breaks and raise revenues in the process. They produce howls of protest from powerful interest groups on the political left and right.

But they each do one more thing: They outline plausible paths to a sustainable fiscal policy.

As a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s task force, I’m very proud of the resulting report. We worked together in a spirit of cooperation and compromise....

By the end of the week, the political landscape in Washington will have changed. We will have a new Congress and attention will quickly turn to the 2012 presidential contest.

Yet, regardless of who ends up in charge of Congress, or who begins making frequent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, certain facts will remain the same.

Health care costs, including Medicare and Medicaid, will still be growing faster than the economy. Social Security will still promise more benefits than it can pay under current law. We’ll still be fighting two wars. The costs of extending all the expiring 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will still top $4 trillion. The economy will still be stagnant. And for all these reasons, the debt will still be on an unsustainable track.

Welcome to Washington, 112th Congress. The nation awaits your solutions to these continuing threats.

Not since 1992, when independent presidential candidate Ross Perot captured 19 percent of the popular vote, has fiscal policy been such a dominant issue in a national election. Voters are clearly uneasy with trillion dollar deficits and a growing debt that is on track to reach World War II levels over the next decade.

As retiring...

Fiscal Year 2010 ended last Thursday but no one was popping champagne corks. Little wonder. For the second year in a row, the federal government ran a budget deficit well in excess of one trillion dollars.

Final figures will be announced later this month, but it seems likely that the FY 2010 deficit was about $1.3 trillion or 9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Regardless of the exact number, there is little doubt that the deficit will be the second largest as a share of GDP since the end of World War II. If there is any good news in this, it is that the deficit came down from the previous year’s total, which at $1.4 trillion (9.9 percent of GDP) was the largest of the post-WWII era.

This might not be as bad as it sounds if the deficit were projected to shrink as the economy recovers. After all, much of the huge spike in red ink can be attributed to reduced revenues and higher spending caused by the recent recession and attempts to deal with it. As these factors fade, the deficit will come down. However, projections for the next several years don’t get much better.

As the new fiscal year began on Friday, the most recent projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) showed a deficit of $1.1 trillion for this fiscal year and cumulative deficits of $6.2 trillion over the coming decade. That,...

Last week, House Republicans offered a “Pledge To America” outlining their fiscal priorities and reform ideas. As with most such campaign manifestos, it is long on base-pleasing rhetoric and short on troublesome details.

The document correctly warns about the dire fiscal outlook and the potential dangers of escalating deficits and debt. Conspicuously missing from the Pledge, however, is any plan to bring deficits down to a sustainable level or even to improve upon the deficit projections in the President’s budget. It is worth noting that such a plan has also been missing from Congressional Democrats this year because Congress has failed to pass a budget resolution.

The net effect of the Pledge policies would do very little, if anything, to rein in our long-term structural budget deficits and may well lead to deficits even higher than under the President’s budget.

Not only would the Republicans cut taxes by more than the President, but they would spend more on defense and repeal cost-saving provisions in this year’s health care reform legislation. In theory, lower spending on non-defense discretionary programs would offset some of this. But savings from discretionary programs, which must be enacted on an annual basis, are far less certain than savings from entitlement reforms or tax increases, which operate...