Obama Targets a 'Grand Bargain' to Fix Budget Mess

From The Wall Street Journal:

Odd as it sounds amid a wheezing economy, mounting bankruptcies and rising unemployment, President-elect Barack Obama and his aides realize they'll actually be dealing with the easy part of their economic challenge when he takes office next week. After all, getting Congress to agree to spend billions of dollars and cut billions more in taxes to stimulate the economy right now is, politically speaking, relatively easy.

The harder part will be trying to follow that up by creating what is coming to be known in Obama circles as a Grand Bargain: getting everyone to agree to clean up the nation's budget mess in a really big way, one that doesn't just fix the problems being created now, but also addresses the frightening long-term problems America was going to face anyway to pay for Social Security and Medicare in coming decades.

For this Grand Bargain to work, all sides would agree to sacrifice some part of their agenda. The price they would agree to pay would be unhappiness -- temporary, perhaps, but real -- among their constituents and favorite special interests. Their reward would be a cure for problems everybody knows they'd have to deal with a few years down the road.

Here's where the Grand Bargain could come in. Like Humpty Dumpty, the budget is going to be broken anyway. In putting it back together, would retirees be willing to accept that idea of having more prosperous seniors pay a monthly premium to receive their Medicare health coverage? Would liberals accept cuts in their favorite social programs? Would conservatives accept the idea of a carbon tax, to both raise big money for entitlements and prod the nation to move more quickly away from fossil fuels?