Fiscal commission chairmen give Obama budget mixed review

The former chairmen of President Obama’s deficit commission on Monday gave the president’s 2013 budget mixed reviews.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles said they are “pleased that the President's latest budget continues to focus on deficit reduction and are also encouraged to see real, specific policies for limiting tax expenditures, slowing health care cost growth, and reducing spending throughout the government. 

The said however that it would not achieve the same level of deficit reduction that the Bowles-Simpson plan released in 2010 would have.

They said it “would only briefly stabilize the debt at a level that is already too high.”

The White House claims to achieve some $3 trillion in new deficit reduction against special measuring stick known as a “current policy baseline.”  Against its own baseline, the Bowles-Simpson plan achieved $4.3 trillion.

The Obama budget has debt held by the public at 77 percent of GDP in 2020 whereas the Bowles-Simpson plan brought that down to 66 percent.

Simpson and Bowles praised Obama for replacing automatic cuts triggered by the failure of the supercommittee.

“We expect Congressional Republicans to now put forward their own proposal for deficit reduction that exceeds the BCA goals while still reflecting their own priorities in the coming weeks,” they said.

 They said that leaders have to move beyond “opening positions” like the Obama budget to a real deficit grand bargain that puts “the debt on a downward path relative to the economy, while getting health and retirement spending on a sustainable path and overhauling the tax code in a way that both reduces the deficit and improves the nation's economic growth and competitiveness. “

The Bowles-Simpson comments follow similar mixed reviews from deficit hawks from the Bipartisan Policy Center, Concord Coalition and Center for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The liberal Economic Policy Institute in contrast said Obama should not have stuck to discretionary cuts in the Budget Control Act because the economy is still too weak.

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