What's the Point of Bipartisanship With a Party That Doesn't Want to Govern?
President Obama and congressional Democrats reached an agreement on Tuesday night to appoint a bipartisan commission. The Washington Post reports: "Under the agreement, President Obama would issue an executive order to create an 18-member panel that would be granted broad authority to propose changes in the tax code and in the massive federal entitlement programs—including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—that threaten to drive the nation's debt to levels not seen since World War II."
But the bipartisan nature of the panel ensures that it will be doomed to failure. The GOP, as currently constructed, is incapable of dealing honestly with the fiscal situation it largely created. It has no political incentive to do so. The only demographic unit it won in 2008 was the elderly. It's now Republican orthodoxy that any cuts in Medicare, or even reductions in the rate of growth of spending, are death panels. Social Security reform is a nonstarter for the same reason. Budgets for defense and veterans are likewise off limits. Which leaves Medicaid and discretionary spending. You can't cut those enough to make a meaningful dent in the deficit—especially if you oppose the reversion of taxes to their 2001 levels. That's Republican orthodoxy, too. If the Republicans are on the inside, they'll gum it from within, as they did with Baucus and health care. And if they're on the outside, they'll try not to let it come to a vote. I'm not sure I see what's in it for Obama and the Democrats.
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Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, where he writes the "Contrary Indicator" column. He writes the twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.
Before joining Newsweek in the spring of 2007, Mr. Gross wrote the "Economic View" column in the New York Times, was a contributing writer to New York, and contributed regularly to magazines such as Fortune and Wired. From 1998-2007, Gross served as the editor of STERNBusiness, a semi-annual academic magazine on economics and management published by the New York University Stern School of Business.
A native of East Lansing, Michigan, Mr. Gross graduated from Cornell University in 1989, with degrees in government and history, and holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University (1991). He worked as a reporter at The New Republic and Bloomberg News, and has contributed hundreds of features, news articles, book reviews and opinion pieces to over 60 magazines and newspapers. Areas of expertise include: economic and tax policy, the links between business and politics, the rise of the investor class, the culture of Wall Street, and business history.
He is the author of four books: "Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time" (Wiley, 1996), which was a New York Times Business bestseller and a finalist for the Financial Times "Lex" award, given to the best business history book of 1996. Translations have been published in Spanish, German, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese; "Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance" (PublicAffairs, 2000); "The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of an American Company," co-authored with Davis Dyer, (Oxford University Press, 20010; and "Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy," (HarperCollins, May 2007).
Mr. Gross appears frequently in the media. A regular guest on CNBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, he has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Bloomberg Television, C-SPAN, BBC, and Reuters TV, and on more than 50 radio programs and talk shows.
Mr. Gross lives in Westport, Conn., with his wife and two children.
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