A week ago Steny Hoyer wrote an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with this title. You can read what Representative Hoyer wrote here. In response to his Representative Hoyer’s article, I wrote the following letter to the editor:
"In ‘We Can’t Run Deficits Forever’ (Op-ed, April 2), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says ‘the single most important thing we can do to get our budget under control is to deal with the costs of our entitlement programs.’[*] We know what we need to do, he says, ‘We simply need the bipartisan will to choose and implement such reforms.’
If Representative Hoyer really wants bipartisanship, instead of the specious kind of ‘you-agree-with-me-and-we’ll-call-it-bipartisan bipartisanship’ that some try to pass off as the real thing these days, then the best idea that has been proposed in a long time has just been reintroduced in the House of Representatives by Cooper (D-TN) and Frank Wolf (R-VA).
Representatives Cooper and Wolf propose a commission, the SAFE Commission (‘Securing America’s Future Economy’), modeled after the federal base-closing process. Everything would be considered. Taxes. Spending. Everything. And Congress would be required to vote, yes or no, on the commission’s recommendations. They couldn’t ignore them, and they couldn’t amend them into meaninglessness with one pork-barrel vote after another.
The base closing process has enabled Congress to save billions of dollars and improve our national defense at the same time. The SAFE Commission would take that same approach and apply it across the whole budget. It’s easy to talk about needing the bipartisan will to pass reforms. The SAFE Commission sets up a process that will actually get the job done."
A very slightly altered version of this letter was published in today’s Wall Street Journal. See here. ------------
* Note: I think this phrase should have read as follows: ‘you-agree-with-me-and-we’ll-call-it-bipartisanship’. I think there may have been a typo in what I sent to The Wall Street Journal and it got published the way I sent it in. I'm not sure.
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