Deficit reality check

Over the last few decades, Democrats have been far more likely than Republicans to favor tax increases as a way to bring the runaway federal budget into balance. But despite that general tendency, the top Democrat on the White House Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is stressing that stemming Washington's red-ink gusher will require serious spending reductions.

As co-chairman Erskine Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina and former chief of staff to President Clinton, put it last weekend at the National Governors Association convention in

Boston: "We can't tax our way out" of the long-term debt crisis.

He warned, too, that "we can't grow our way out of this," explaining: "The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We've got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

While Mr. Bowles rightly supports the necessary "combination" solution, he also advocates limiting federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product to 21 percent. While it's "only" 24 percent this year, a new projection from the Congressional Budget Office shows it rising at an alarming rate in the next two decades.

And Mr. Bowles recently told the other 17 commission members that while this year's sweeping health care reform law will provide overdue access to medical services, it also raises serious bottom-line risks. He predicted that if major savings aren't found in federal health care and other entitlement programs, they will "just consume the budget."

Mr. Bowles' realistic perspective has drawn deserved praise from fellow commission member Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin congressman, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, called the co-chair "my new favorite Democrat," adding: "The explosive growth of government spending is clearly the problem, and I was encouraged by the growing consensus around this obvious reality."

The hard choices that must be made on both the spending-reduction and revenue-generation side will keep getting harder each time they're postponed. The record deficit of 2008 was $455 billion. Last year's was roughly three times higher at $1.4 trillion. Though this year's deficit estimate has recently receded from $1.6 trillion, which would be another record, to less than $1.4 trillion, our profligate trend is simply not sustainable.

Yet the House again passed the budget buck late last month by passing a fiscal plan covering just one year instead of producing the standard five-year blueprint. At least President Obama, at the G-20 summit in Toronto late last month, joined other nations' leaders in vowing to cut their deficits in half by 2013.

However, it's much easier to talk about lowering deficits -- and spending -- than to actually cut either. And ultimately, our elected officials can't solve this growing problem by handing it off to a "blue ribbon" commission. That's why it's essential for federal lawmakers to follow through on the panel's recommendations after it delivers them, if on schedule, late this year.

Still, it's reassuring to hear the initial bipartisan acknowledgement from prominent members of that commission on the pressing need to get Washington spending down to responsible levels.