Mr. Will, by ample analysis, recommended Congress follow a similar approach on entitlements, by applying the mechanism of phased, mandatory, automatically implemented reforms.
Unless Congress enacts “excruciating changes” to address the republic’s fiscal shortfall, Mr. Will asserted, Social Security and Medicare will become insolvent. This long-standing prediction is based on a demographic reality in which resources will shift from a shrinking young sector to a growing old one.
Congress has proved itself capable of devising autopilot mechanisms. The bundle of acts that came to be known as “sequestration” is a perfect example: A fictional executioner wielding a budgetary scythe makes the requisite cuts when procedurally triggered by the mice on Capitol Hill who can’t decide who is in charge of the cat’s bell. Sequestration began in 2013 and continues in some form to this day.
The Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia’s BRAC-like solution to entitlement reform reads like Simpson-Bowles, as Mr. Will described it. “Simpson-Bowles,” shorthand for a report issued by the 18-member commission appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010, similarly posited tax increases and cuts to spending. Alas, the report sits on congressional bookshelves, dead and unread.
Solving the entitlement debt crisis is no mystery. It takes political will. It does not require, as Mr. Will opined, diminishment of Congress. Or even cutesy tethering, as Odysseus chose when tied to the mast, listening to those Sirens. Rather, Congress should take control of the tiller and steer a course between our fiscal Scylla and Charybdis. That would hit a real Homer.
