Climbing the Summit to Talk About a Mountain of Debt

This is budget week in Washington, with President Obama's "fiscal responsibility summit" scheduled for today, a presidential speech Tuesday and a proposed budget to be submitted Thursday.

Here are a few things to watch out for:

• Short-term and long-term
  
  We've got two issues to deal with: the current budget deficit, likely to top $1 trillion this year, and the long-term problem of a $10 trillion national debt that will only get higher given the costs of Medicare and Social Security. We've got to deal with both. President Obama said this weekend he wants to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term, but he hasn't said how.



• Health care, Social Security, or both?
  
  There are two reasons why the federal budget is in trouble over the long term: rising health care costs and demographics, as the baby boomers retire and start drawing government benefits. That's why the biggest part of our long-term problem is Medicare, which gets hit on both fronts.
  
  There's been fierce debate over what to tackle first. Advocates of health care reform say it's the bigger part of the problem, and reforming the health care system has plenty of social benefits apart from helping the federal budget. Others argue that health care is devilishly complicated, while fixing Social Security is relatively simple. A Social Security plan could provide the Obama administration with a comparatively easy win on this issue. The current betting is that Obama will go for health care, but we'll probably find out this week.



• Is everyone on board?
  
  If bipartisanship is needed anywhere, it's needed on the federal budget. There are so many minefields that any leader needs bipartisan cover to make progress. In Washington, this issue doesn't so much divide people as Democrats or Republicans as it does between those who want to act now and those who don’t. This week we're going to start finding out whether people are willing to reach across the aisle on this.

So stay tuned.