Chattanooga's Bob Corker has probably never been content tinkering with small problems and little ideas. He's always been a builder with a bigger vision.
He started his working life as a construction worker, built a construction business, rose to become the city's largest property owner, went on to become a widely regarded state finance commissioner, and then became this city's renaissance/water-front building mayor. Since taking over a U.S. Senate seat in 2007, he has quickly forged a reputation for tackling the largest challenges in Washington.
There he has entrenched himself in the most important committees working on the biggest problems: foreign policy, armed services and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; financial regulation, banking reform, auto company bailouts and the fallout of the Great Recession; housing and urban affairs.
The problem: federal debt
Now, he's targeting the mother of all legislative problems and battles - the United States' federal debt. It now stands at $13 trillion, a figure equivalent to 62 percent of gross domestic product. At current projections, it will rise to 146 percent of GDP in just the next 20 years. Such a debt-to-GDP ratio would easily outpace Greece's current crisis percentage.
That's flatly unsustainable.Corker, like every other elected official in Washington, knows it. Unlike most others, he's developed a zeal for slaying the deficit dragon. In the August recess he went to 26 counties - including Hamilton - to present his power-point slide show on the debt issue and build support for his new mission.
Frightening trends
The trends he cites track those of other deficit hawks. By 2020, the presently projected gap in Washington's revenue and spending could hit $1.25 trillion a year. The pie-chart chunks of federal spending would shift dramatically: Interest costs on debt would soar - from $187 billion in 2009 to $916 billion in 2020 - and discretionary spending (i.e., defense, highways, education) and mandatory spending on entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) would shrink proportionally.
Corker is reasonably alarmed by such trends. Disproportional debt, and its resulting interest costs, not only consumes savings, starves critical public programs and piles up crushing burdens for our children to struggle under. It also destabilizes the nation and leaves our fiscal security in the hands, increasingly, of foreign national banks and other alien lenders.
His worries are in good company. The Concord Coalition, a premier bipartisan group of fiscal policy wonks and former elected officials, has just hooked up with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, headed by David M. Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general who's written an encyclopedia on the debt, to launch a nationwide "fiscal solutions tour" that will focus on the same issues.
Blame to go around
Corkers approach to the debt problem and how to solve it may be unique, however. His initial premise is that there's plenty of blame to go around for the past spending that's now driving the debt, and that we now need to agree on a solution.
Both political parties, he says, have done their share. We would quibble on that: the Republicans - from Ronald Reagan's supply-side voodoo economics to George W. Bush's profligate credit-card doubling of the federal debt, from less than $6 trillion to more than $12 trillion - have far out-borrowed and out-spent Democratic administrations in the last 40 years.
President Obama, by contrast, just walked into the triple whammy fallout of Bush II's debt binge, plus a huge fall-off in federal tax revenue due to the Great Recession that an unregulated Wall Street unleashed, plus the need to do stimulus spending to keep the recession from crashing into a bona fide depression.
Regardless, the Republicans still won't agree to drop the top-tier Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2-to-3 percent of taxpayers when they expire at the end of this year. Letting that top-end tax (for incomes above $250,000 for a couple, or $200,000 for single taxpayers) expire would alone save $700 billion a year.
Never mind the past
Corker says, never mind. If we argue about the past, we won't focus on the future and the debt problem that is engulfing the nation.
He's right. His big idea is to come together in Washington and agree on how much debt we are willing to carry relative to tax revenue, and then fix spending cap as a fixed percentage of GDP.
Historically, the United States' midpoint tax revenue figure has been around 18 percent of GDP. To reach a balanced budget, spending would have to fall to the same level. The problem is, the 50-year average for spending is now about 20.3 percent.
Given debt and spending priorities already in the pipeline (two credit-card wars, big tax cuts and the recessions tax whammy have already baked big pending deficits), projections are for $6.7 trillion in additional deficits over the next 10 years. (For comparison: the 2010 budget shows current revenue of $2.381 trillion dollars, spending of $3.55 trillion, and a deficit of about $1.2 trillion.)
Working down the slope
Corker recognizes that the nation cannot ratchet down the debt level quickly to a balanced budget without stalling the economy and throwing the country into a deep recession. His goal to develop a target for more sustainable spending - a fixed "cap" on spending at a defined level of GDP - would require a bipartisan agreement on his spending cap to drive budget policy decisions going forward.
If it takes means-testing for Social Security or Medicare, program cuts and higher taxes - in whatever proportion - rational fiscal thinking must take precedence over divisive partisanship, so be it.
Sen. Corker is on the right path. He has prepared legislation that, if accepted, would force such an agreement. Realistically, he doesn't expect that to happen. But he does want to help change the terms of political debate on spending. The question is whether he can succeed, where others have failed, to persuade enough other people in Congress to look beyond the next election and embrace his mission.