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" In 2001, the Congressional Budget Office \u2014 we&amp;#039;re sorry: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office \u2014 projected average annual surpluses of about $800 billion for the 2009 \u2014 2011 fiscal period. Today, that very same office, singled out so pointedly these past few months by President Obama for its impartiality, has us running sky-high deficits for as far as the eye can see. Huh. That&amp;#039;s weird. It&amp;#039;s almost as if the federal government, having struggled mightily to get its financial house in order in the nineties, willfully and knowingly undid all that progress and spent us back into the deepest of holes without bothering to figure out how the hell we might dig ourselves out. But that&amp;#039;s just not possible. How could that be possible? It can&amp;#039;t be possible. It is impossible.  Except, of course, it&amp;#039;s not. And except for the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform \u2014 President Obama&amp;#039;s deficit-reduction panel, whose final report, if history is any indication, will be widely appreciated and largely ignored \u2014 we still haven&amp;#039;t figured out what we&amp;#039;re going to do about it. Except, perhaps, make it worse, as nobody, not even the big brains over at the Government Accountability Office or the Office of Management and Budget, has any idea of how health-care reform will affect long-term deficits and the solvency of the United States of America. And so we point fingers and crouch under desks, our leaders posturing and our politicians pandering, as we contemplate a bleak future in which the numbers begin to crush notions of American greatness.  To risk oversimplification, the leadership deficit we face breaks down thusly: We&amp;#039;ve got our profiles in courage on the Far Right, who spent like drunks in a whorehouse while Bush was in the White House yet became born-again deficit hawks the instant Obama moved in, all the while refusing to do basic math and admit that we&amp;#039;ll need new revenue (translation: raised taxes) to get out of this mess. And we&amp;#039;ve got our profiles in courage on the Far Left, contorting themselves with the most painful sort of creative math to somehow demonstrate that the seismic new health-care reform will not blow a massive hole in the budget, all the while (and with rare exception) refusing to be honest about the entitlement programs that sit like an elephant on the federal budget, for fear of pissing off Floridians. To fix this mess and avert society-changing catastrophe, we need a plan \u2014 a specific, actionable plan that outlines how the government can eliminate the federal deficit by 2020. And we need smart people to create the plan \u2014 smart, sensible people, Democrats and Republicans, who&amp;#039;ve dealt with the federal budget before and who&amp;#039;ve shown a willingness to make tough, unpopular decisions. We need a commission \u2014 a real commission \u2014 to present the plan and make it official. We need, in short, the Esquire Blue Ribbon Commission to Balance the Federal Budget. Over the next few months, the Commission \u2014 under the steady hand of Chairman Lawrence O&amp;#039;Donnell and with the planned participation of former senators Bill Bradley, Bob Packwood, John Danforth, and Gary Hart \u2014 will meet to negotiate, compromise, and forge a nonpartisan, commonsense alternative to the hyperpartisan status quo. Nothing will be off the table \u2014 no tax too prohibitive to be levied, no budget expenditure too sacred to be cut, and no report from the CBO, GAO, or OMB too dull to read. Some may say that in this political climate, a balanced budget is clearly impossible, but O&amp;#039;Donnell would be the first to tell you it&amp;#039;s just not so. As an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the chief of staff of the Senate Finance Committee in the early 1990s, O&amp;#039;Donnell helped manage the passage of the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which passed Congress without a single Republican vote and was signed by President Clinton. It raised taxes and cut expenditures, and thanks to further Republican-driven budget cuts and a booming economy that sent tax revenues soaring, our accountants had us back in the black by 1998. It stayed that way for three more years before history came crashing down on all of us. And Dick Cheney had his Rushmore moment when he fearlessly declared: &amp;quot;Deficits don&amp;#039;t matter.&amp;quot; Remember where you were when you heard him say that? Yeah, us neither. Just ask Greece if deficits don&amp;#039;t matter. Just ask our Chinese bankers. The challenges facing us today are more daunting than the ones back then: the enduring economic crisis; the endless wars; the looming Social Security crunch as baby boomers begin to retire en masse. We could go on. But through the work of the Commission, we hope to remind Americans that not only is a balanced budget possible \u2014 it&amp;#039;s within reach.  As John Kennedy famously said: &amp;quot;Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man.&amp;quot; Moreover, ladies and gentlemen, we simply have no choice.  We&amp;#039;ll be reporting back to you in the fall. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7953/balance-the-budget-0810/>