Saving face in Washington

A good political compromise leaves nobody happy. Unfortunately, a bad compromise does the same.

In a mad hash over the weekend, Washington settled on a last-second deal to avert default on $14 trillion in federal borrowing.

The prospective deal would bring an end to months of unhinged brinksmanship that supplanted real negotiation, replacing statesmen and -women with caricatures willing to destroy the economy for partisan advantage.

Sadly, the plan the White House and Congress cobbled together ensures that the same unhinged brinksmanship will be with the nation for months to come. To describe the new agreement as insufficient doesn’t begin to acknowledge its shortcomings.

Budget cuts — $2.4 trillion over 10 years —are laughably inadequate to address the nation’s financial problem. Much of the immediate cutting, as is Washington’s way, is actually in projected increases in future spending. The plan includes no tax reform, virtually guaranteeing that there will be little visible dent made in the nation’s debt.

The agreement does allow President Barack Obama to increase the nation’s debt limit, but only after Congress gets to disapprove of his decision, the kind of face-saving political gimmick that allows Washington to have it one way in reality and the other way in campaign commercials.

While Congress is voting to disapprove of raising the debt ceiling to spend money it has voted to approve, it will create a special commission to find cuts equal to the debt ceiling increase.

Why? Because, in Washington, irrelevant mathematical symmetry is preferable to cogent reasoning about the size and scope of government.

It gets worse.

The special commission would produce a deficit reduction proposal by Thanksgiving that Congress would be able to approve or reject, but only in total. The goal is to mimic the dynamic of the Base Realignment and Closure process, which was created when Congress proved too craven to shutter bases that employed their constituents.

In an added complication, if Congress can’t pass the debt-reduction commission’s proposal, automatic budget cuts would kick in. The prospective cuts have apparently been chosen specifically to encourage acquiescence by Democrats and Republicans, rather than being selected to make government more efficient and cheaper.

Some see that as a recognition of the poisonous realities of politics in 2011. But it is more appropriately a symptom of the cowardice that has paralyzed partisans more interested in re-election than in solutions to the nation’s problems.

So, after months of agony and financial uncertainty, this is what Washington comes up with: an inadequate series of gimmicks and triggers that allows Congress to avoid making the decisions members were specifically elected to make.

And nobody can be happy about that.