Opening Day for the baseball season has come and gone in Washington but for the budget season it comes on Wednesday, when the President officially unveils his Fiscal Year 2014 proposals. Will he get a hit or be sent back to the bench?

Early indications are that he will at least put the ball in play, and that’s a promising start.

Some Republican leaders in Congress have already declared, in effect, that the President’s budget is a whiff or a foul ball at best. Even among Democrats, there are those who seem to regard the forthcoming budget as a sacrifice bunt because of its apparent concessions to Republicans on entitlement cuts.

Clearly, there will be a vigorous debate. However, there is reason to be optimistic that the President’s budget may help move budget discussions in the right direction.

If preliminary reports are correct, the budget will include a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases that would bring the deficit down to 1.7 percent of GDP by 2023. That’s higher, but more realistic, than the House Republicans’ balanced budget goal and more ambitious than the Senate Democrats’ goal of bringing the deficit down to 2.2 percent of GDP.

 In other words, it aims for a compromise, albeit one closer to the Senate Democrats’ goal, which is hardly surprising.

The key, of...

The “dynamic scoring” debate is back again. Last week the House Ways and Means Committee—chaired by Dave Camp (R-MI), who also happens to be a member of the debt-limit deal’s “super committee”—held a hearing on the subject, calling on the Joint Committee on Taxation’s chief of staff, economist Tom Barthold, to explain why that committee still estimates the revenue effects of tax legislation using “static” methods.

The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery reported on this “old battle,” wondering out loud whether the super committee will resort to dynamic scoring as a “magic elixir that greases the skids to a more far-reaching compromise.”

Well, unfortunately for certain policymakers, dynamic scoring is not so magical.

“Dynamic scoring” refers to revenue estimates that would be...

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...