Andrew posted earlier today about the supposedly innovative plan to limit the impact of entitlement programs on the budget put forward by a bi-partisan alliance of conservative and liberal think tanks.

This is definitely much ado about very little.  According to Andrew, the report makes the following three recommendations:

• Congress and the president enact explicit long-term budgets for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that are sustainable, set limits on automatic spending growth, and reduce the relatively favorable budgetary treatment of these programs compared with other types of expenditures.
• The programs be reviewed on a regular schedule by the Social Security and Medicare Trustees or the Congressional Budget Office to determine whether they will remain within budgeted amounts.
• Significant long-term deviations from budgeted amounts trigger automatic adjustments in benefits, premiums, provider payments, or other revenues. These adjustments could only be over-ridden by an explicit vote of Congress and acceptance by the president.

As Andrew notes, #2 is already in place.  Most of #1 is also already in place.  Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are entitlements, so the amount that will be spent is determined by the number of people who qualify under exiosting law and the benefits those people are legally entitled to receive.  In other words, it's basically just a formula; there is no "budget."

Can someone tell me what "sustainable" means?  It sounds like the kind of word committees use when they are trying to come up with language that satisfies everyone without committing the report to anything specific that everyone opposes.

"Favorable budgetary treatment"? Are they really asking for annual approval of the  amounts to be spent?  If so, why don't they just say so?

Number 3 is really nothing more than a call for cuts in these programs.  But the report  wants to do it automatically, that is, without a debate or vote.  In other words, the report calls for the same type of entitlement mechanism it says it is rejecting.  The only difference is that the one it recommends has a negative rather than a positive sign.

The one thing that's clear from the report is that it was written by people who aren't running for reelection.  You simply can't take politics out of the budget no matter how much you might like to do so.