This presidential race is sure to draw sharp divisions on budgetary questions in 2012, but prominent policymakers are hoping a flickering of bipartisanship may keep alight the flame of cross-party cooperation long enough to stave off national financial ruin.
In a Brookings Institution blogpost, former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin laments the missed opportunities of the past year, the unlikelihood of consensus in the current election year and the narrow window of time to reach compromise in 2013.
"Whatever happens in the 2012 election, big decisions on taxes and entitlements will still require bipartisan compromise," writes Rivlin, who co-chaired with Pete Domenici the Debt Reduction Task Force sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center. "A re-elected President [Barack] Obama or a new president, working with a new Congress may be able to forge a solution early in 2013, but time is running out. A punishing market reaction to American political dysfunction could turn the missed opportunities of 2011 into prolonged economic failure."
In her blogpost, Rivlin, who also served on Obama's bipartisan commission chaired by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, criticizes the president for failing to champion either commission's recommendations after they reported on schedule and substantially agreed with each other; she also condemns Republican "intransigence."
Both commissions proposed slowing entitlement growth, capping discretionary spending and lowering rates on individual and corporate income taxes, while broadening their bases to increase revenue. Yet the president, she writes, "made the tactical error of focusing solely on job creation, which made his jobs bill a partisan Democratic proposal instead of an element in a bipartisan plan for growth and deficit reduction. The Republicans, she adds, "were willing to risk closing the government and defaulting on the nation's debt in their zeal to shrink the public sector."
