MattY is upbeat about the value of a budget commission aimed at taking the tricky matter of long-term deficit/debt reduction slightly out of the partisan arena:
Politicians love commissions. They love them so much that journalists have come to love cynically deriding them. So now that talk of a “budget commission” to tackle the long-term deficit is in the air, people are being cynical about it. I actually think commissions are a pretty good idea since congress is so bad at designing policy. The real question is what would a serious budget commission look like?
I think Pete Davis and Bruce Bartlett have some pretty good posts on this matter. I would say the most important thing is for congress to not entirely abdicate its policymaking role. The key is to actually tell the commission, in a real way, what it wants studied. Reduce the deficit to such-and-such a percent of GDP relative to baseline and do it this percent with tax cuts and this percent with spending cuts. That’s a real mandate, and exactly the sort of decision elected officials should be making. Similarly, if congress wants the Pentagon to get special treatment, they should say so. With that done, having a commission try to work out the details within the framework of a congressional mandate makes sense.
This is relevant to me because, back when I was in the academic track, my likely dissertation topic was an analysis of blue-ribbon commissions and similar policy strategies. These commissions have the reputation of being empty gestures to avoid real action, but they also have a reputation of being a way out of partisan deadlock or in making difficult decisions (military base closings). There is a very limited literature sorting out what makes a panel effective, hence why I considered it a good topic for research.
This post is not about commissions, but about academia. I might, this very moment, be working on such research that might have a valuable contribution to the policy process, but graduate schools suffer from a rigid system of socialization that attempts to squeeze out originality or ambition outside arbitrary goals of the profession. This expected practice did not align with my styles of learning or thinking, so within their standards, I was a failure. So alas, I am no longer in academia and this research is left undone.
