Back in the days when I first arrived in Washington, Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming was one of my favorite people to seek out. That was pretty much the case with just about every other reporter in town, too. Simpson was always good for a salty quote; more importantly, he had a way of looking at things that made you consider them in a different light, too. He was ahead of his time–and his party–on many issues, including budget deficits; for instance, he clashed, publicly and often, with Reagan and his Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger over the need for bringing defense spending under control.
So upon hearing the news that he and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles had been tapped to head President Obama’s new deficit-reduction panel, I turned to The Google to refresh my memory on where Simpson stood on one of the most brain-dead things that Congress did in that era: the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. It was a political stunt, an attempt to substitute the hollow threat of automatic spending cuts for political will. Imagine my surprise when one of the first things to pop up was a story of mine, a version of which ran in the Milwaukee Journal on Sept. 29, 1986. That article, written around the first anniversary of the act that promised to balance the budget, pretty much declared the whole exercise dead. And there was Simpson’s picture, with a very Simpsonesque quote:
Suffice it to say, that latter part didn’t exactly work out the way that Simpson hoped it would. Will he have more luck this time around? It’s a heavy lift, as the Wall Street Journal noted:
The commission’s job will be to help bring down the federal budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product by 2015, compared with nearly 10% today, and to propose ways to hold down the surging costs of government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The president will also ask the panel to look at the U.S. tax code and has not ruled out tax increases for the middle class should the commission deem them necessary.
What’s more, it has no authority to enforce its recommendations, and before it even begins its work, is confronting outright hostility from Capitol Hill. Simpson acknowledged the challenge ahead in an interview with the Billings Gazette:
“It is going to be difficult, maybe a complete zero,” he said by phone on Wednesday from Washington, D.C.
“But I’ll tell you one thing, when we’re through, people will know a hell of a lot more than where we are now,” he said.
All we can say is: Good luck with that, Senator.