by Dick Hall-Sizemore

There has been much commentary on this blog lately about the size of the national debt and the need to cut federal spending. Many of those commenters point fingers at Democrats as being the big spendthrifts. I would like to add a little perspective to this discussion.

When reading the obituary for the late U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming), I was reminded that President Barack Obama appointed Simpson, along with Democrat Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Unlike most such commissions, this one came up with a set of serious recommendations, many of which President Obama included in his budget proposals.

For example, in his 2014 budget proposal, Obama included a deficit reduction package. That package included proposals that would have reduced the national debt over ten years. Included were substantial savings in Medicare and the adoption of an alternative cost-of-living adjustment affecting Social Security. According to one analysis, “coupled with the deficit-reduction steps that the President and congressional leaders already have enacted, this package would bring total deficit reduction achieved to $4.5 trillion over the decade.”

The Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, declared, “This [deficit reduction] package would reduce the deficit by $1.8 trillion over the next decade and go somewhat beyond stabilizing the debt as a share of the economy, setting it on a slight downward path.” Another, more middle-of-the-road think tank, the Committee for a Responsible Budget, was more cautious. It commented that while the Obama deficit reduction package “would be a very welcomed package of savings but would almost certainly need to be followed with additional deficit reduction in order to put the debt on a truly sustainable path.”

I did not take the time to research how much of the Obama package was adopted by Congress. However, surely whatever was adopted, any chances of “stabilizing the debt as a share of the economy” and getting it “on a truly sustainable path” were blown apart by the 2017 Trump tax cuts followed by the COVID relief measures.

The bottom line: A Democrat president proposed a serious plan to reduce the deficit, including structural changes in entitlement programs. Contrast that with the situation today.