Analysis: The legend of Simpson-Bowles

Coming this holiday season! From the people who brought you the most acclaimed, misconstrued, pain-laden tax and budget plan of all time! 

Simpson-Bowles: The Sequel. 

A crowd of ex-politicians and business executives, led by former Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles have been working behind closed doors on Simpson-Bowles 2.0.

If all goes well, this updated deficit-reduction plan, with fresh new segments on health care policy and taxes, will be unveiled after the election, when Congress confronts the fiscal cliff and must decide the fate of trillions of dollars in expiring tax provisions and spending cuts.

Amidst the expected chaos, the relaunch of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposal, as it is properly known, could become the de facto template.

“Simpson-Bowles is a brand that’s very well accepted by most Americans,” says Gregg, the former chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “It’s a vehicle that has great credibility, because it’s the only vehicle that is bipartisan and substantial on fiscal reform. It’s a hugely significant starting point.”

To build support for the plan, Gregg and Bowles have met with a bipartisan group of roughly 40 senators who are wrestling with the end-of-the-year tax and spending questions. The group has hosted discussions and dinners with think-tank scholars from the Concord Coalition and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as with roughly 100 executives from Fortune 500 companies.

Momentum may be building. Hardly a day goes by in Congress or on the hustings without some lawmaker extolling Simpson-Bowles as the kind of potent fiscal medicine Americans must swallow if the country is to fix its debt and deficit problems, reform government and revive the economy. It’s becoming all things to all women and men. 

When President Obama and Mitt Romney want to demonstrate they are bonafide fiscal tigers, they cite Simpson-Bowles. When the tax- and budget-panel chairmen and their corresponding ranking members assure their constituencies that there is light in the gloom, they point to Simpson-Bowles. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants praise its fiscal formulas. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his captains hail its call for discipline. Speaker John Boehner calls it “the menu” that guided him during budget negotiations with the White House.

“The Bowles-Simpson group is the best example of what can be accomplished,” says Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. It can serve as “a consensus bipartisan template.”

It offers “a conscientious way to address the debt and deficit,” says Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

Simpson-Bowles helped foster and fuel the ongoing push for tax reform. The commission was for changing Medicare before changing Medicare was cool. There is a growing feeling on Capitol Hill, says Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, that something like the Simpson-Bowles “framework” will ultimately be passed by Congress and feted at a signing ceremony on a sunny South Lawn.

Something like. There’s the rub. Click here to read the rest of this National Journal article.