Baby Boomer Blues
As a Generation of Americans Gets Older, Entitlement Reform Needs Order
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Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.) has been chairman of the House Budget Committee for only about six weeks, but he already has what may be the toughest job in Congress.
With President Bush having delivered his fiscal 2008 budget proposal to Capitol Hill last week, Spratt is now the House’s point man in figuring out how to balance the budget requests of a diverse House Democratic Caucus, the demands for more military spending and his own expressed desire to eventually bring the budget back into balance.
At the same time, Spratt is thinking about the monumental challenges of long-term entitlement reform and how cost increases in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid can be kept in check.
Roll Call Executive Editor Morton M. Kondracke recently sat down with Spratt for this extended interview.
ROLL CALL EXECUTIVE EDITOR MORTON M. KONDRACKE: There have been these various proposals to have a commission or high-level negotiations or something like that between the administration and Democrats in Congress to solve the long-term entitlement problem. Where is that going?
HOUSE BUDGET CHAIRMAN JOHN SPRATT (D-S.C.): My attitude has been ... that the first thing we should do is concentrate on the main budget — the base budget — because the first entitlement is debt service. It is obligatory. Social Security, Medicare can be changed, but the interest on the national debt has to be paid at market levels, and frankly we have whittled it down during the ’90s [and it’s begun] to expand again. If you can diminish that wedge of the budget you can leave resources for the resolution of Medicare, Social Security where otherwise they would be eaten up by interest payments that have to be made. So I think that is the first step.
Once you get out of that step, in addition to a first start on the problem, it is with some confidence you can move on to bigger and better things. I think it would be a mistake to put all the entitlements in one commission. That is more than the traffic will bear. If you look at other commissions that have done that, their reports are still on the shelf somewhere drawing dust and nothing ever happened to them. The [ex-Sen. Bob] Kerrey (D-Neb.) commission did a very good job, but to no avail. I am not aware of anything that grew out of that report that has been implemented.
So the second point is it needs heavy Congressional involvement so that the leaders in Congress who participated, the Members who participated in it, feel some equity in the outcome. One, they understand it because they have been there putting the issues together, but No. 2, they feel some compulsion to get it passed. ...
The one thing that made [the 1997 budget summit] work — it turned out it was not that big a deal because most of the heavy lifting had already been done, but it all just put the budget in the black for the first time in 30 years. Clinton called for those hearings, for those negotiations. I was in favor of it, [then-Rep. John] Kasich (R-Mo.) was in favor of it. [Sen. Pete] Domenici (R-N.M.) and Sen. [Frank] Lautenberg (D-N.J.) — we were all for it. ...
ROLL CALL: Do you see any willingness on the part of the parallel participants now to engage in that kind of negotiation?
SPRATT: Of course [Sens. Kent] Conrad (D-N.D.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) have talked extensively about it on a trip they took to South America and came back with some fairly specific ideas. I think it is premature, but it doesn’t hurt to talk about it and see if anything grows out of it.
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