Along with creating jobs, looking at the “fiscal balance” of the country is one of the two major items the House will focus on, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said this week.
Democrats will be looking to return “to the fiscal health that we had, frankly, as we began this decade in 2000,” Hoyer said Tuesday.
But while work continues on various proposals to create jobs, a legislative portfolio for reducing the deficit and moving into fiscal balance is taking much longer to develop and move forward.
Part of the problem is the size of the deficit, which at an estimated $1.3 trillion cannot be reduced significantly in the near term without unthinkable spending cuts or tax increases.
What’s more, a fiscal reform commission created by an executive order issued by President Barack Obama — which is supposed to consider even the most politically unpalatable options, such as drastic changes to entitlement programs — won’t submit its recommendations to Congress until December, a full month after the November elections that Hoyer acknowledged will be, to some degree, about the deficit.
Another problem is that most of the ways the deficit could be significantly lowered are politically untenable, or would threaten to hurt the economy at a time when Democrats are looking for growth in jobs.
Since passing a pay-as-you-go law, Congress has been burning through items that have been marked as exempt, including a $154 billion jobs bill that House leaders still hope to take into conference with the Senate.
A number of House Democrats — beyond the usual group of Blue Dogs — have taken note of the trend, and are not pleased.
“We need to be more judicious and selective about what constitutes an ‘emergency’ spending bill,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition. “The other thing is we can’t accept false promises.”
Some Democrats also worry that with liberals posturing against entitlement cuts and Republicans pre-emptively rejecting tax increases, the fiscal reform commission amounts to just that.
But the non-political alarm bells are getting louder as well.
On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned the Joint Economic Committee that Congress must soon make “difficult choices” on the deficit or risk putting the economy in even greater jeopardy.
“At some point, the markets will make a judgment, really not about our economic capacity but our political ability, our political will, to achieve longer-term sustainability,” Bernanke said.
Bernanke conceded that, in the short term, there is little that can be done to close the budget gap, but he said that a “credible plan” to reduce the deficit is urgently needed.
Hey dummies, congress as a whole cannot find solutions to the deficit. And you dummies let all of congress keep digging the hole deeper because you would rather scream "liberal socialists" instead of attack the issues directly.
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