"Obama weighs ordering new debt commission"

Obama weighs ordering new debt commission

Posted: December 15th, 2009 06:39 PM ET

From CNN Senior White House Correspondent Ed Henry

Washington (CNN) - CNN has learned President Obama is seriously considering an executive order to create a bipartisan commission that could weigh sweeping tax increases and spending cuts to popular programs like Social Security and Medicare in order to try slash the soaring federal deficit.

Documents obtained by CNN show that top advisers to the President have been privately weighing various versions of a commission and there are differing opinions about how to structure it. Officials say that some inside the administration are pushing for a narrow mandate because it's too complicated to tackle reform of the tax system and various popular federal spending programs all at once.

"Each major category of fiscal policy - Social Security, Medicare, discretionary spending, revenues - raises a complex and idiosyncratic array of policy problems and prescriptions," according to the documents detailing some of the administration's deliberations. "Achieving consensus on any one of these issues - much less all of them simultaneously - may be more than the political system can reasonably accommodate."

But officials told CNN that other advisers to the president are pushing for the commission to have a broad mandate to put all of these big issues "on the table" at the same time.

"The nation's unsustainable fiscal course is the result of imbalance across the budget as a whole, not any component in isolation," according to the documents, which are marked "Preliminary and Pre-Decisional - Not For Distribution".

"And, in both the 1990 and 1993 budget deals, the final compromises encompassed both revenue enhancements and spending reductions," add the documents. "Such deals, touching on both sides of the budget ledger, perhaps offer the best way of achieving a bipartisan deficit reduction package."

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/15/cnn-exclusive-obama-weighs-ordering-new-debt-commission/