No Pox On Both Your Houses Now

This essay was originally published on The Arena at Politico.com

While there are many ways to cut the deficit, there are three things which will have to be done if we are to do more than pretend that we are dealing with our very real fiscal challenges: raise additional revenue, cut defense and restructure/cut health and Medicare costs. Given how much these three items contribute to the overall budget, all potential meaningful deals must contain all three of these actions or the math won’t get one very far.

To date the Democrats have shown a significant commitment to taking all three actions, the Republicans have shown a similar level of reluctance to tackle any of the big three. Democrats cut Medicare in the 2010 health care deal, something the Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars reminding voters about in the fall elections last year.

The current Democratic Administration is responsibly reducing America’s military footprint and creating the global conditions which will allow a gradual and smart reduction in our annual military expenditures. Many Republicans have shown great unease or outright hostility to this current plan. And finally on taxes, the Republicans are simply not willing to even entertain any serious effort to raise revenues, while the Democrats are putting reasonable revenue raising proposals on the table.

In the days ahead the media must resist the simplistic “pox on both your houses” analysis of the current budget debate. When in power in the 1990s the Democrats turned record deficits into record surpluses, and left the nation on track to be debt free in this decade. Republican tax and spend policies unraveled that accomplishment and has left the nation with the structural deficits we have today. In the past few years, the Democrats have repeatedly shown how serious they are both about reducing the deficit and doing so in a balanced way that doesn’t harm the economy in the short term.

During that time Republicans have repeatedly fought common sense measures intended to deal with the deficit they created, and have once again, through the unreasonable negotiating positions adopted in the supercommittee, have reminded us all that over the past 20 years there has been one political party in America serious about growth and a smart fiscal future for the country, and one that has done everything in their power to undermine that approach.

Update, 12/7 - In looking at the recent WSJ/NBC poll, the one I use these days as a benchmark, it is also clear the public is not blaming each party equally fror what has gone wrong this year.   I review some of the basic data here, but in this poll the favs/unfavs of the Democrats is 40/37, Rs 31/44, and Party ID is 46D/36R/13I.  From the data in the poll is it is clear folks are unhappy with Washington, but view the Democrats in a fundamentally different - and much more positive - way than the GOP.  There also isn't a lot of evidence in this poll of a movement away from the two parties.  In this poll 5 times as many people identify with one of two parties than "independent."