Does Gene Sperling misunderstand the debt deal?

Mickey Kaus Columnist
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Is top Obama economic aide Gene Sperling misreading the debt deal his boss just signed? Keith Hennessey says he is, though Hennessey’s obviously reluctant to call Sperling out by name. … What the dispute is about: Sperling says, in his own boldface, that the deal

does not anywhere require the Committee to work off a current law baseline. 

Hennessey has reread the law and says this claim is “absurd.” If Hennessey’s right, the upshot seems to be that the 12-member Joint “SuperCongress” Committee won’t get credit toward meeting its deficit reduction target of $1.8 trillion for a tax reform plan, unless that plan (lower rates, fewer loopholes) raises more money than would be raised if the Bush tax rate cuts are allowed to expire as scheduled, something that is apparently highly unlikely. …

That doesn’t mean they can’t do tax reform, of course. Just that they can’t count it as a plus, even if it would raise more in taxes than the current, low Bush rates do.  

But Sperling seems to think they can count it. Alarming if he discovers he’s wrong now, after the deal has been inked. …

Update: Lawrence Summers characterizes the dispute as a disagreement the Big Debt Ceiling Deal unaccountably doesn’t resolve. (He even suggests Sperling’s interpretation is more “more likely” to be adopted.) James Horney even argues that it would be unconstitutional for a law to require use of a CBO number to measure whether the $1.5 T target has been met and the debt ceiling can be lifted. … A key point: Even if Hennessey is right, this isn’t a statute that is going to be intepreted and enforced by judges the way a normal law would be. If the Democrats insist on using an “alternative” baseline, they aren’t going to be sued and vanquished in court. The “SuperCongress” talks will simply deadlock, leaving the automatic “sequester” to do the budget-cutting work (if all goes according to the deal). …

Needless to say, even if the SuperCongress committee assumes for “baseline” purposes that the Bush tax cuts are going to expire, this doesn’t mean they will. They could be extended ‘outside the process,’ increasing the deficit no matter what this week’s Big Deal says. That’s what Hennessey, for one, thinks will happen. Indeed, the Obama White House position–that it should count as deficit reduction a tax reform that raises less money than simply ending the Bush tax cuts would–makes the most sense if you assume that Obama wants to bargain away ending the Bush cuts in exchange for the tax reform.

But if the White House and Congress can extend the Bush tax cuts while the new SuperCongress committee assumes they expire, the deal is a bit of a con, isn’t it? It allows elected officials to make an elaborate show of trimming the debt with one hand while they simultaneously increase it with the other.  …

Mickey Kaus