Alan and Erskine bowl a strike

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are out with an op-ed exquisitely calibrated to extend the life and influence of their commission's deficit reduction/tax reform plan and the negotiating process it kicked off.

At its heart is a delicately-couched challenge to the president that takes its force from acknowledging the potential efficacy of Obama's stated strategy:

Sadly, the president does punt on the larger issues. On health care, his budget calls for only a handful of savings and then asks Congress to identify the rest. He falls far short of comprehensive reform needed to simplify the tax code - broaden the base, lower rates and reduce the deficit - and proposes instead a small limit on deductions for higher earners (which Congress has rejected the past two years). He proposes nothing for restoring the solvency of Social Security, simply calling for a bipartisan process.

And yet, he's right: A bipartisan process is where this must start. In his news conference Tuesday, the president said that the fiscal commission plan represented a "framework for a conversation," noting that "this is going to be a process in which each side, in both chambers of Congress, go back and forth and start trying to whittle their differences down until we arrive at something that has an actual chance of passage."

Matt Miller's self-cancelling 'don't worry about the deficit now' argument

Matt Miller's argument that worries about the Federal deficit are overblown is self-cancelling.

The argument has two prongs. First, per his experience in the Clinton administration in 1993, he suggests that current deficit forecasts are often overblown.  A period of strong growth can change the picture fast. Second, Miller asserts that we more or less know what to do but lack the political courage.

The second point at least is incontrovertible.  Miller sketches out two key planks of likely deficit reduction: breaking Obama's pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $250k per year and "trimming social security benefits for better-off retirees."  In other words, raise taxes and cut benefits.

But his argument that we should not worry now about the looming need to do just that makes no sense.  Blame Obama if you will for his no-new-taxes-under-$250k pledge. (I do: I have always thought that David Brooks' one valid fundamental criticism of Obama during the campaign was that this pledge would box him in.) Or defend it as a valid attempt to avoid the recurrent pattern of Republicans destroying our finances with tax cuts and Democrats getting killed at the polls for raising them -- as they did in 1994 -- by getting as much juice as possible out of taxing the wealthy.