Alan Simpson

There’s some light at the end of the tunnel. Just a thin ray, and at the end of a very long tunnel littered with government and private debt.

It just might be that the battles now going on in Congress about this year’s budget will prove to be a sideshow. After all, the difference between the Republicans’ insistence on $60 billion in spending cuts, and the Democrats’ offer of $10 billion is about 1% of the $3.8 trillion budget, a rounding error in the long-term budget outlook.

The odds were always against President Obama's deficit commission. The 18-member panel, co-chaired by former Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles of North Carolina, is due to release a report in December that will "put forward proposals to balance the budget excluding interest payments on the debt (the so-called primary budget) by 2015 and to meaningfully improve the long-term fiscal outlook," according to OMB director Peter Orszag. The hitch: proposals won't be made unless they earn the backing of 14 commission members. Hence a five-person bloc can effectively veto drastic spending cuts or, more likely, tax increases.