Automatic budget cuts considered

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress and President Barack Obama are proposing ways to automatically trigger budget savings if they can’t rein in deficits the old-fashioned way, by enacting laws to cut spending or raise taxes. Similar efforts in the past have a spotty record.

The last quarter-century has seen plenty of missed deficit and spending targets and inventive evasions of budget curbs. This is because the same legislators who put in place those budget constraints can pass laws to ignore them.

That history has convinced analysts that automatic triggers work best when lawmakers already have approved spending cuts, taxes increases or both. They’re least effective when used as an incentive to force legislators into such agreements in the first place.

“Process alone is never going to bring about fiscal responsibility,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that wants to erase federal deficits. “If the political actors are not willing or ready to make hard choices, they won’t.”

This year’s expected record deficit of $1.5 trillion and a cumulative national debt topping $14 trillion have snowballed into a major political issue that probably will color presidential and congressional elections in 2012.

As a result, Washington is awash with proposals from Obama, lawmakers and anti-deficit groups such as the Bipartisan Policy Center to automatically trigger budget savings if ceilings on spending, the national debt or other benchmarks are pierced.

A quarter-century ago, lawmakers were looking for similar mechanisms.

When Reagan-era deficits reached the unprecedented $200 billion-a-year range, Congress in 1985 enacted the Gramm-Rudman law, sponsored by Sens. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, Warren Rudman, R-N.H., and Ernest Hollings, D-S.C.