Could an election fix the deficit?
Washington will no doubt wait until the results of the 2012 election are in to reach a budget agreement. Perhaps there will be valuable discussions about tax expenditures leading up to the election, but don't count on it.
Jean-Marc Thelusma Jr. peeks out from a voting booth while his father Jean-Marc Thelusma Sr. casts his ballot in Somersworth, NH, Nov. 4, 2008. Will the 2012 presidential campaign bring fruitful discussions about tax policy? Probably not, writes guest blogger Howard Gleckman.
Adam Hunger / Reuters / File
I spent this morning at one of those Washington institutions: the budget roundtable. Today’s (at the Aspen Institute) gave me a chance to pose a question in exchange for my muffin: Should Washington await the results of the 2012 election before reaching a cosmic budget agreement?
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Howard Gleckman is a resident fellow at The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the author of Caring for Our Parents, and former senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week. (http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org)
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It will, of course. The odds that President Obama and Congress will reach across the gaping fiscal divide anytime soon are vanishingly small. But does it even make sense for lawmakers to agree to what would be a profound change in the relationship between government and the people without first having an election?
Here is why they should wait…and why they should not.
Why we need an election:
Education: The public desperately needs to learn about the real consequences of big deficits and what it would take to reduce them. Polls show that people overestimate the cost savings of cutting foreign aid and “waste, fraud, and abuse.” They also overestimate the financial problems of Social Security and grossly misunderstand the nature of Medicare. And they are completely mystified about the workings of the tax law. What better forum to highlight all of these issues than a political campaign?
Consensus building: Today, the public is not prepared to either sacrifice benefits or pay higher taxes to reduce the deficit. A December 2010 Pew poll reported that only two deficit reduction ideas—freezing salaries for federal workers and raising Social Security taxes for high-earners– enjoyed majority support. Do Americans really want to cut the deficit, and how? That’s what elections should be about.
The 1994 presidential race is an interesting case study. Before that campaign, there was little public support for budget cutting. But key swing voters were moved by Ross Perot’s ceaseless focus on the deficit, according to political scientist James Shoch. Exit polls that year showed that more than half of all voters—and two-thirds of Perot voters–saw deficit reduction as the single most important issue. While Bill Clinton didn’t campaign on deficits (in fact, he ran on new public investment) he quickly flipped after the election—in part because of that change in public mood generated by Perot.
Here is why we should not wait for the election to address deficit reduction:
