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EDITORIAL

A Budget Deal to Live By, for Now

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

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OCT. 27, 2015

The budget deal agreed to

Monday night by Republican and
Democratic leaders is modest by
any fiscal measure. But it still
counts as a big victory for
common sense. For the past
seven years, the Republicans goal
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has been to thwart President

Obama at the expense of the
nations economic and financial
health. Of course, Republican
hard-liners are not about to give
up on that mission and are likely to oppose the deal. Fortunately for
everyone else, they do not appear to have the votes to derail the
package.

Jennifer Heuer

Assuming Congress passes the deal, it will avoid a potentially

devastating default on the governments debt by extending the debtlimit deadline from Nov. 3 until March 2017. It will also help to avert a
government shutdown in December by providing federal financing
through September 2017. It closes a hole in the Social Security disability
fund that threatened severe benefit cuts and prevents an imminent
steep increase in out-of-pocket costs for many Medicare beneficiaries.
By resolving those issues into 2017, the deal frees President Obama and
congressional Democrats to focus on real rather than manufactured
problems. It also allows Paul Ryan, who is expected to become the next
speaker, to avoid an immediate budget fight and a government
shutdown engineered by Tea Party supporters in the House.
The deals modest $80 billion increase in discretionary spending over
the next two years (not counting a $32 billion increase in emergency war
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spending) is evenly divided between defense and nondefense programs,

including health care research and federal law enforcement. The reforms
to the Social Security disability program are prudent and sustainable as
opposed to the deep and unnecessary cuts that several congressional
Republicans have called for recently.
As with any compromise, the deal is not perfect. Medicare beneficiaries
are shielded from having to pay more by cutting payments to doctors
and hospitals, a workable though painful trade-off.
The deal also leaves for another day another president and a future
Congress the most divisive and serious budget issues. The nation
requires vastly more federal spending to meet the needs of a growing
and aging population in the face of technological change, security
concerns and educational and environmental challenges. More spending
requires more taxes. Yet Republicans, including the partys presidential
candidates, continue to call for high-end income- and estate-tax cuts,
while refusing to consider a financial transactions tax or other more
modern ways to raise revenue.

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Democrats, for their part, have not done

enough to contradict the Republicans nonew-taxes stance and have yet to generate
the consensus and exert the political power
needed to enact plans to bolster the
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economy, its tax base and federal spending.

That fuzziness is being sharpened as the
Ent er your email address
presidential candidates put forward their
In theand
meantime,
the issues of why
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services.
and how taxes have to go up will remain
SEE SAMPLE
PRIVACY POLICY
hard to explain and easy to use against any
politician willing to talk about these issues.
That said, there is no reason to lament the
lack of a grand budget bargain at this time.
In recent years, Republican leaders have not
had enough control of their caucus to deliver big votes, and Democrats,
overeager to make a budget deal, were in danger of agreeing to overly
deep spending cuts.
Given those political realities, this weeks deal is about the best that
could be hoped for.

A version of this editorial appears in print on October 28, 2015, on page A24 of the New York edition with
the headline: A Budget Deal to Live By, for Now. Today's Paper | Subscribe

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