Like Tim Fernholz, I'm at the joint conference on "how progressives should think about the deficit," put on by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress. Tim notes that the presence of Franklin Raines, former president of Fannie Mae, and Bob Rubin, formerly of Treasury and Citigroup might "offend those both on the left and the right." Tim's an awesome reporter, but he left out a key detail: Rubin and Raines weren't on any of the conference panels. They were just hanging out in the audience and listening, like me and Tim -- just another two guys who didn't need to be in the office this morning. And when they asked questions, Rubin identified himself as, "Bob Rubin of the Council on Foreign Relations," and Raines as "Frank Raines, formerly of OMB." As Tim reports, Paul Krugman was very much the outlier to a general consensus that, as Bob Greenstein of CBPP put it, "Deficit reduction is not antithetical to progressive values." Among the more compelling arguments for that consensus (in which I share) came from former Treasury official Roger Altman, who pointed out that if we don't address deficits that will average more than $1 trillion in each of the next 10 years, "a solution will be imposed on us," either by political or economic circumstances, and an imposed solution is least likely to reflect progressive values. But looming over the gathering were a set of unspoken, uncertain assumptions about the political process. For Krugman, it was an assumption that the political process was unlikely to be rational enough to accept that a deficit of about 4 percent of GDP was not an economic problem. For others, it was a doubt that the current political system could ever make a set of responsible choices to limit growth in health spending and raise taxes. (A central proposition of the more conservative fiscal hawks such as those around the Concord Coalition and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation is that the political process can never make such choices and thus a bipartisan commission is needed.) Greenstein pointed out that the ordinary political process did make choices to reduce the long-term deficit in 1990 and 1993 (I would add 1997), and could do so again, but there is no doubt that the structure of Congress has changed since then, as have the stakes. But there may be an opportunity in the fact that the consensus around long-term deficit reduction coincides with a consensus, even among the Peterson Foundation fiscal hawks, that in the short-term, we have to spend more to keep the economy afloat. It is at such moments, when the short-term pain is minimal, that the process might be able to make long-term choices. But it is remarkable how much the unanswered questions at a conference like this one are political, not economic. -- Mark Schmitt