county news online
Politico...
Old problems dog new debt debate
By David Rogers

One old face and another old problem were back on the Senate’s calendar Wednesday, twin reminders of how stubborn budget deficits can be even when you think you have a fix.

Former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican synonymous with many of the biggest fiscal fights of the 1980s, appeared before a Senate Finance Committee as an expert witness on the shortcomings of budget enforcement mechanisms — some of which he designed and Congress is now reconsidering as part of an upcoming debate over raising the federal debt ceiling.

At the same time, fast on the heels of devastating tornadoes in the South, the old question of shortchanging disaster aid is back, with Democrats pressing President Barack Obama to address an estimated $3 billion shortfall in his 2012 budget. The skirmish is the latest in what’s become an aggravating series for the House and Senate appropriations leadership over the past 18 months and has already contributed to major cuts in state and local homeland security grants even as lawmakers fear a terrorist blowback after the killing of Osama bin Laden.

For Gramm, the professor-turned-pol-turned-banker, Wednesday’s return was his first congressional testimony since leaving the Senate in 2002, and it was both serious and, at times, comic.

He allowed later that his famous personal political barometer, small-town printer Dickey Flatt, is now active in the tea party. But Gramm, 68, a vice chairman at UBS investment bank, never ruled out new tax revenues as part of a final deficit compromise. And when Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) opened by quoting Confucius — “He who does not economize will have to agonize” — the Texan soon fell back on the Southern churches of his Georgia youth.

“If we don’t have a crisis now, I don’t know how anybody will ever make a case that we have a crisis,” Gramm said of the $14 trillion-plus debt ceiling that must be raised this summer. “If there ever was a circumstance that ought to sort of — in old religious terms — bring people to the foot of the cross, it seems to me that this is it.”

“Action is always preferable to process” was his central message, but whatever rules Congress adopts should start immediately. “Doing something and not starting it until Jesus comes back creates the impression that we’ve done something and it actually hurts the whole process,” Gramm said.

The 1985 Gramm-Rudman law, which Gramm devised with then-Sen. Warren Rudman, a more moderate Republican from New Hampshire, was Congress’s most famous early experiment with automatic across-the-board spending cuts or sequesters as a means of enforcing deficit targets and leading to a balanced budget.

Read the rest of the story at Politico


 
site search by freefind
click here to sign up for daily news updates
senior scribes

County News Online

is a Fundraiser for the Senior Scribes Scholarship Committee. All net profits go into a fund for Darke County Senior Scholarships
contact
Copyright © 2011 and design by cigs.kometweb.com