Las Vegas Review-Journal: The Only Palatable Budget Path ‘Is to Clean House’

Governments at all levels love “blue-ribbon commissions.” Politicians empanel these bodies to make it look like they’re doing something of great importance for the general public. The appointed commissioners spend months meeting and laboring over some difficult problem. After much debate and many public hearings, they release a report with great fanfare detailing suggestions for solving the weighty matter at hand.

And then the politicians dump the report in the circular file.

Is there any reason to think a national debt commission proposed by the House Problem Solvers Caucus would be any different? Maybe … if lawmakers were forced to vote on binding budget recommendations. Perhaps we’ve finally reached a point — $32 trillion in the red and counting — at which voters are prepared to support candidates who take the looming crisis seriously.

“The path forward is not political brinkmanship, but to remove politics and punt the solution to a nonpartisan committee, subject only to an up-or-down vote by Congress,” Philip K. Howard, author of the “Death of Common Sense,” wrote last month for The Hill. “Just as independent ‘base-closing commissions’ decide the politically-difficult choices of which military bases to close, so too an external ‘Fiscal Commission’ could present broader proposals that will have benefits as well as costs for most stakeholders.”

Read the full article here.