Another of the serious dysfunctions of Congress in recent decades has been the tendency toward ever-increasing national debt. We know why it happens. Promises -- for services or achievements, ranging from warfighting to more accessible health insurance -- are easy to make, and they win votes for Congressmen, while finding ways to pay for those same services and achievements is difficult, unpopular, and garners no votes. Members of Congress often add to the problem by forcing the continuation of unneeded programs; Republicans have often done a double disservice by insisting on tax cuts even as they propose expensive new initiatives.
So, whether it's a war (as in the Bush administration), or an improved health care delivery system (as under Obama), the executive branch also often plays along in the game of buy now, pay later, which is usually accomplished by disguising or purposely underestimating the costs of new or expanded programs. Presidents don't veto bills that may be the only way of getting their programs enacted,
Up to a point, living on borrowed money provides benefits (a higher standard of living than would otherwise be possible) but in the longer run it destroys our national creditworthiness. That's the situation now, as the Clinton success in eliminating the deficit was turned into 10 trillion dollars of debt in only seven years, mainly by Bush's war in Iraq; and the economic downturn necessitated still further spending to try to halt the deterioration. New health care entitlements will add costs too; they are in the future and haven't hit us yet, but the huge shadow they cast has created a greater sense of urgency about doing something to remedy our growing debt. Adding to the urgency are concerns that our debt overhang may cause creditor nations like China to look elsewhere to invest their money, or that continuing shrinkage of our discretionary spending ability will lead us into the same financial dead end as the state of California.
Enter the "commission" approach, which is now being suggested as the possible answer. Politically, it's the much-applauded model being used for decisions about closing/realigning military bases: A commission studies what's needed, prepares a package of recommended actions on which Congress must vote as a whole. In the base-closing context, the commission model seems to have successfully eliminated most of the acrimonious, politically charged squabbling between individual legislators each trying to protect their own parochial interests.
The fact that a couple of Senators from states with no population (Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire) are now hoping to put together a bipartisan commission proposal, and that it has some chance of gaining traction, is a positive development. Although clearly there's a long way to go, the prospect of getting anything accomplished on debt reduction is welcome, and should be encouraged.
Still, it's extremely discouraging that we have to resort to this sort of special arrangement at all. What we admit in doing so is that the standard mechanisms of orderly government that have served us so long are for some reason no longer adequate to resolving endemic political and economic problems. And that's no cause for cheer. A further downer is that even if a single commission can craft a solution that's accepted and pulls us back from the brink of disaster, there is nothing to prevent an immediate return to the same dysfunctional operation, with another crisis ten or twenty years down the road.
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