Politico...
Old problems dog new
debt debate
By David Rogers
One old face and another old problem were back on the Senate’s calendar
Wednesday, twin reminders of how stubborn budget deficits can be even
when you think you have a fix.
Former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican synonymous with many of
the biggest fiscal fights of the 1980s, appeared before a Senate
Finance Committee as an expert witness on the shortcomings of budget
enforcement mechanisms — some of which he designed and Congress is now
reconsidering as part of an upcoming debate over raising the federal
debt ceiling.
At the same time, fast on the heels of devastating tornadoes in the
South, the old question of shortchanging disaster aid is back, with
Democrats pressing President Barack Obama to address an estimated $3
billion shortfall in his 2012 budget. The skirmish is the latest in
what’s become an aggravating series for the House and Senate
appropriations leadership over the past 18 months and has already
contributed to major cuts in state and local homeland security grants
even as lawmakers fear a terrorist blowback after the killing of Osama
bin Laden.
For Gramm, the professor-turned-pol-turned-banker, Wednesday’s return
was his first congressional testimony since leaving the Senate in 2002,
and it was both serious and, at times, comic.
He allowed later that his famous personal political barometer,
small-town printer Dickey Flatt, is now active in the tea party. But
Gramm, 68, a vice chairman at UBS investment bank, never ruled out new
tax revenues as part of a final deficit compromise. And when Senate
Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) opened by quoting
Confucius — “He who does not economize will have to agonize” — the
Texan soon fell back on the Southern churches of his Georgia youth.
“If we don’t have a crisis now, I don’t know how anybody will ever make
a case that we have a crisis,” Gramm said of the $14 trillion-plus debt
ceiling that must be raised this summer. “If there ever was a
circumstance that ought to sort of — in old religious terms — bring
people to the foot of the cross, it seems to me that this is it.”
“Action is always preferable to process” was his central message, but
whatever rules Congress adopts should start immediately. “Doing
something and not starting it until Jesus comes back creates the
impression that we’ve done something and it actually hurts the whole
process,” Gramm said.
The 1985 Gramm-Rudman law, which Gramm devised with then-Sen. Warren
Rudman, a more moderate Republican from New Hampshire, was Congress’s
most famous early experiment with automatic across-the-board spending
cuts or sequesters as a means of enforcing deficit targets and leading
to a balanced budget.
Read the rest of the story at Politico
|
