Budget Reform

It's a fair bet that when Leon Panetta took the helm of the Pentagon last week, one of his marching orders was to find more ways to cut the defense budget, and not just around the edges.

One result of this is that the Army will very likely take a whacking.

In the wake of the recent financial meltdown from which we are still recovering, the United States faces the prospect of yet another crisis—a federal debt crisis. Averting crisis will require tough choices and painful sacrifice, including those from federal workers. This crisis can be averted, however. And the sooner we act, the better. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Fiscal Commission”), on which I served as associate director, has shown a way forward.

We face historic challenges at a time when our state is increasingly thought to be ungovernable. Our outmoded system of government is crippling our ability to deliver basic services to the Californians who create our extraordinary productivity and prosperity – and undercutting our ability to plan and invest for the future. There are plenty of proposals for reform, but the public is often distrustful of those who offer them. It's time to change the process.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., probably did not anticipate the kind of trouble his plan for privatizing Medicare would cause members of his own party. Ever since Democrats scored an upset in a New York state special congressional election that turned on the Republican candidates support for the Ryan plan, GOP presidential hopefuls and lawmakers have been stumbling around the negative reaction the "Path to Prosperity" has drawn from many voters.

If you are an informed, fair-minded person, chances are you feel at least conflicted about all the hard-knuckle attacks on public employee unions in Madison, Wisconsin, and other state capitols. While Governor Scott Walker's agenda was clearly much larger than balancing his current budget, there is no denying the magnitude of the pension crisis. Long predicted, it's finally here, and it's constricting the art of the possible in almost every state.

In February 1993, as the fledgling Clinton administration grappled with the nation's budget woes, campaign adviser James Carville groused to The Wall Street Journal: "I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everyone." If Carville were serving in the Obama administration today, he'd be seeking reincarnation as Bill Gross.

President Obama's budget speech was one part Obama, one part Clinton, one part China. The Obama part came at the end. It was a gesture toward recapturing the image he enjoyed between 2004 and 2008: As the guy who didn't hate and wasn't hated, the guy who could help red and blue America get along. "This sense of responsibility—to each other and to our country—this isn't a partisan feeling," Obama declared. "It isn't a Democratic or a Republican idea. It's patriotism."

In his recent it’s-time-to-get-serious-on-the-budget speech, President Obama introduced his idea for a debt fail-safe to, in his own words, “hold Washington — and to hold me — accountable and make sure that the debt burden continues to decline.” While budget trigger mechanisms

This is an idea so terrible and without merit that one has to wonder if some of its backers are simply trying to make money by taking short positions on municipal bonds.

For years, Western journalists and commentators have depicted the continent of Africa as an economic basket case, a caldron of hunger, joblessness, corruption and despair where living standards have barely risen. Certainly the figures on gross domestic product, the standard measure of growth and income, suggest as much. Between 1960 and 1999, per capita GDP in the world’s more developed countries rose from $13,000 to $31,000. During this same period, it went from $477 to just $561—about $1.50 a day—in sub-Saharan Africa.