Debt Debate Offers Something For Everyone To Hate

The debt and the deficit are the big subjects of the moment in Washington. On Wednesday, yet another bipartisan group will try to tackle the problem of the mounting national debt with a plan to bring the country's fiscal situation back into balance.

There's wide agreement that the current situation is unsustainable: Spending is increasing faster than the economy or tax revenues can grow. Exit polls in the midterms showed that — along with jobs — this is a top concern of voters.

But there's no agreement on how to solve the problem, says former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin — the only person who's serving on all three of the deficit panels presenting reports over the next few weeks.

"I think the public doesn't understand the choices very well yet," Rivlin says, "and that's because in the election, there were a lot of people saying, 'It's really easy — just do this one simple thing.' Just cut the spending or just raise the taxes or just cut out waste, fraud and abuse. But if you sit down with the numbers and look at what the government actually does and how it pays for it, it's obvious that there is no simple solution."

A Trap?

The proposal Rivlin's bipartisan task force will unveil Wednesday, like the one the chairmen of the president's deficit commission released last week, has something for everyone to hate: spending cuts and tax hikes. And it will probably be attacked the same way that first proposal was — by advocates on the left and right.

On one side of this fight is Democratic congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, who called the proposal "simply unacceptable," and Roger Hickey of the labor-backed Campaign for America's Future.

Hickey sees the deficit commissions as a trap for Democrats. "Starting this deficit commission, it has shifted the entire discussion away from 'how do you get jobs' to 'how do you get deficits under control,' " he says. "It would be the worst thing in the world for the Democrats to allow conservatives to mousetrap them into embracing cuts — draconian cuts, really — to Social Security."

While Republican congressional leaders were relatively silent, conservative activists were not. Grover Norquist, whose "no new taxes" pledge has been signed by hundreds of officeholders, also says the proposals are a trap — but for Republicans.

"The deficit is what Democrats talk about when they're trying to shift the conversation from their spending," he says. "The problem is spending. You can only fix a spending problem by spending less. Raising taxes is being an enabler — not helping to reduce the spending problem."

Resolving The 'Hugh Jidette'

President Obama sees himself somewhere in the middle. He's always said he doesn't want to kick the can down the road on these fiscal issues.

But, as he told 60 Minutes shortly after the midterm elections: "If you eliminate all the earmarks, you eliminate all the foreign aid, you eliminate all the waste and abuse that people, you know, talk about eliminating, you're still confronted with the fact that the vast majority of the federal budget are things that people really think are important — like Social Security and Medicare and defense. And so you then have to start making some tough decisions about how do we pay for those things that we think are important."

Right now, there's not a constituency for those tough decisions, but there is an effort to create one. The Peterson Foundation is trying to educate people about the dangers of the growing debt with an ad starring a fake presidential candidate named Hugh Jidette — "huge debt," get it?

"As president, I promise your taxes will help build roads, bridges and schools," he says in the ad. "Oh, not here. Overseas. I'll keep using your taxes to pay over $100 billion a year in interest to foreign lenders — helping their economy, hurting ours."

Implicit in all the deficit reduction proposals is a challenge to groups on both the left and right — to come up with alternatives to the recommendations they oppose.

Hickey says his group plans to do just that. "I'm happy to announce that with all of these right-wing commissions, we at the Campaign for America's Future ... are going to come out with our own report on how you get deficits under control by growing the economy and investing in the future."

While there may be no resolution to this debate anytime soon, the issue is set to be the next big conversation in American politics — and maybe the subject of the next election.