Opinion: Is the Debt Commission Serious?

(April 27) -- Before President Barack Obama's debt commission officially met for the first time today, he told the members that "everything has to be on the table" when it comes to reducing the nation's gargantuan debt.

Presumably, that would include Obama's own budget.

After all, his budget plan, released earlier this year, would leave the country $5 trillion deeper in debt than would otherwise be the case, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's because Obama's budget would spend more ($2.3 trillion more) and take in less money ($1.4 trillion less) than if the government were just left on autopilot for the next 10 years.

Worse, most of that extra spending would be for entitlement programs, adding nearly $2 trillion to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other automatic benefit programs (plus more interest on the resulting bigger debt).

Back in 1970, these "automatic" spending programs accounted for 31 percent of total federal spending. Today, they make up 62 percent. And the two biggest ones -- Social Security and Medicare -- are on a trajectory to consume the entire federal budget, as baby boomers age into retirement and health costs rapidly rise. Under Obama's budget plan, they would rise to more than 70 percent of the budget.

And, while the administration touted health reform as a way to at least get federal health care spending under control, it actually will end up adding to the federal tab, according to a report out last week from the administration's own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

It found that reform will add a net total of $251 billion to the federal government's health care bill over the next decade. And that assumes Congress cuts $575 billion out of Medicare, although the CMS report itself says some of those savings "may be unrealistic."

But even canceling Obama's budget plans would still produce in 2020 a national debt of $15 trillion -- an amount equal to more than 67 percent of the nation's total economy (it hasn't been above 50 percent since 1970), the CBO says.

And, in any case, scuttling the president's budget wouldn't be that easy to do, since it includes, in additional to health reform, popular but costly initiatives like extending President George W. Bush's middle-class tax cuts and finding a permanent fix to the dreaded alternative minimum tax.

All of which points to the immensity of the challenge the country faces when it comes to getting annual deficits under control, a challenge the public tends not to fully grasp.

When asked about what programs the federal government should spend less money on in order to reduce the deficit, most typically point to relatively tiny items like foreign aid, earmarks, or waste and abuse.