The bipartisan budget deal negotiated by congressional leaders and the White House has all the features, good and bad, we’ve come to expect from such agreements.
It contains gimmicks and future savings that may not materialize but are supposed to offset additional spending, which totals $80 billion over two years plus $32 billion more for emergency operations overseas.
The deal does little to address the long-term growth of entitlements, which will lead to a major federal debt crisis in the next decade, and fails to impose spending reforms on the Pentagon.
And the upside? The biggest one is that it raises the debt ceiling and thus averts a government shutdown over what should be an uncontroversial obligation of government — namely to pay its debts. And it pushes the next battle over the debt ceiling to 2017 and thus prevents it from becoming an election issue.
It also gives more flexibility to Congress in areas of discretionary spending rather than have those programs held to formulaic “sequester” limits that may not make sense. Finally, the deal includes a few genuinely worthy reforms, such as reducing farm subsidies and trying to get control of Social Security disability growth.
We can certainly understand why the House approved the deal Wednesday and the Senate is expected to do so, too.
But sadly, the deal also highlights the unfortunate way that this country is now governed, with neither party willing to be fully honest about the budget or to make the hard choices that eventually will be required.
Despite official assurances, for example, the deal will add to the federal debt, as the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has explained. The committee points out that some of the supposed offsets involve double counting or are gimmicks such as “pension smoothing.” Meanwhile, the committee rightly complains, “emergency” military spending has become a regular back-door tactic since the days of President George W. Bush for boosting the Pentagon budget without even the pretense of paying for it through new revenue or savings elsewhere.
This is classic short-term thinking masquerading as responsible governing. And yet it’s still better than any alternative that could muster a majority of congressional votes with the support of the president.
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