CONGRESS is back in session, and the first order of business is to limit the impact of impending tax increases and budget cuts and avoid setting off a recession. Beyond that looms the unsustainable long-run debt trajectory.
Discussion of the debt trajectory is focused on some sort of grand bargain. Even if one is achieved, there's reason for pessimism: any bargain is likely to sidestep, or even enshrine, many of the root causes driving inefficiencies in our nation's spending and taxes.
Congress, with its eyes on 2014 and beyond, can't take the risks involved with genuine reform. Limits on total spending and tax revenues are too likely to be changed by future Congresses when they are required to deal with the unspecified details needed to fit within those limits.
Instead of wide-ranging, politically motivated panels, we need narrowly targeted commissions, without sitting members of Congress, modeled on the successful Base Closure and Realignment Commissions of recent decades.
Compare the successes of five consecutive base-closing commissions, which were charged with shuttering or shrinking military facilities, and the failures of both the Simpson-Bowles Commission and the deficit "supercommittee."
In all of these cases, Congress recognized the difficulty in addressing an important issue, and committed itself to a no-amendments, up-or-down action on a possible commission report.
Each report from the base-closing commissions resulted in closures. In contrast, the Simpson-Bowles report did not receive enough votes to prompt Congressional action, and the supercommittee did not even finish a report.
What accounts for the different results? One key difference across these commissions was their makeup. The base-closing commissions did not include sitting members of Congress, while about two-thirds of the Simpson-Bowles commission were sitting members, including six of the seven who did not support the draft report. The supercommittee had only sitting members of Congress.
A second critical difference was the commissions' respective assignments. The base-closure commissions were given a narrow focus on military installations and a goal of more efficient government activities. For the other two commissions, the topic was a vast overhaul of the federal budget, a range so wide there was no hope of sufficiently addressing government inefficiencies.
There are simply too many moving parts for one panel to handle. For example, one much-discussed way to boost revenue is to limit total income tax deductions — but that approach would not distinguish between deductions that were good tax policy ideas and ones that should be sharply cut back or eliminated, an enormous task in itself.
And even if a deal comes together, grand bargains reached by sitting members of Congress are likely to be revised and further watered down just as the sequester will not happen as it was legislated last August. Members of Congress are concerned with the good of the country, as they see it, and the election and re-election of themselves and members of their parties. The presence of both concerns complicates deal making and may prevent it completely.
What we need, instead, is a set of narrowly targeted commissions, each with a clearly articulated task and the ability to require a no-amendments, up-or-down vote — and all without sitting members of Congress. Like the base-closure commissions, the panels could include former members of Congress, tax and budget experts, and representatives from the business and public-interest community.
We could create, for example, one commission to design a plan to restore balance to Social Security, one to review income tax deductions, one to review tax expenditures that target single industries and one to consider smaller programs for possible closure or merger.
Such commissions would do more than just avoid politically driven compromise. The members would look not at pointlessly large total spending and tax numbers, but specific types of spending on specific programs. Real progress on an array of programs will impress voters and the bond market more than vague promises about future budget balance that may have little credibility.
Some might worry that this approach risks creating "smoke-filled rooms," in which unelected officials decide the fate of the nation. But with Congress setting the goals of the commissions and having the final say, this is no less part of the democratic process than leaving the details of the design of bridges and tunnels to engineers. And concern about the up-or-down vote will keep the commissions connected to political reality.
Let's put aside, for now, the fight over more or less government, and work for better government. We shouldn't try to settle the very real concern about the long-term debt trajectory all at once. Doing so would probably fail, and it might even leave us worse off.
Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate in economic sciences in 2010, is an emeritus professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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