In 2011, our unsustainable federal budget finally did get the attention it deserves. What we mostly saw, however, was the spectacle of Washington trying to force itself to do something it wasn’t sure it could actually pull off.

That took the form of a series of artificial fiscal crises, built around arbitrary legislative deadlines: passing spending resolutions, raising the national debt ceiling, extending the payroll tax cut, and the fight over the “supercommittee” set up to resolve our fiscal problems.

None of these was a real fiscal crisis, which happens when a nation’s lenders finally decide to turn off the tap. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon for the United States (although if you want to see what a real crisis looks like, just consider Europe over the past few months). All of our crises were brought about by politicians trying to use these deadlines as leverage for budget solutions.

And what did we get? Not a deficit plan. We didn’t get an economic plan, either, which is pretty surprising given the unemployment numbers we face.

So is there any good news?

First, the nation’s unsustainable fiscal course is on the agenda, and there’s no way candidates can avoid addressing it in the 2012 elections. No candidate should be able to get away without having a credible plan to deal with both our budget problem and our economic problems.

Second, as Ezra Klein and others have pointed out, for the first time the “default setting” on the budget favors fiscal responsibility. In January 2013, unless Congress acts, we’re looking at $1.1 trillion in automatic spending cuts (the “trigger” set by the failure of the supercommittee) and $4 trillion in new revenue if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire. That would make a significant dent in our fiscal problems.

Of course, you also have to believe that Congress will let these triggers happen. When Washington is faced with an unpleasant budget choice, whether it’s driven by a trigger or not, the record shows that Washington usually flinches.

That may be the real cost of 2011′s budget debate: not that Congress and the White House failed to act responsibly, but that hardly anyone expects them to act responsibly. Congress’ approval rating is down to 11 percent, the lowest Gallup has ever recorded, and the constant budget fights have had a lot to do with that. The public is exhausted, and frustrated, and probably not in the mood to listen anymore.

The cold fact is that the steps needed to put the budget on a sound trajectory require leadership. They require setting national priorities, and they require sacrifices to achieve those priorities. If you can’t have everything, then you have to decide what you want most and how much you’re willing to pay for it.

The American public is fully capable of having that conversation. Usually they don’t get the chance, because they’re rarely presented with real options, with the pros and cons of each choice laid out. If political leaders took on that job, the public could still be engaged in making those choices.

The problem is that no one is inclined to listen to an institution with an 11 percent approval rating. Congress spend this year trying to save money, but in the process it ended up spending too much of the public trust. And trust is the one element that’s absolutely essential in setting budget priorities and making them stick. You can get people to accept spending cuts and tax increases – if the public believes they’re really necessary. But if the public doesn’t trust politicians to make these judgments, they’re not going to buy into any budget plan, even one imposed by some automatic trigger.

That’s what the budget fight is about, in the final analysis: not numbers, but trust. The only way to solve our budget deficit is to start working on the trust deficit as well.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

A Pew Research Center survey released last week found that the 59 percent of Americans say so much is wrong with the tax system that “Congress should completely change it.” That’s up 7 points since 2003. Only 43 percent say the federal tax system is fair, down 8 points over the same period.

Yet the Pew survey also shows, strikingly, that it isn’t the size of their tax bill that’s bothering people. Nor is it a sense that they don’t get anything back for their money.

In fact, the number who say they pay more than their fair share of taxes, “considering what you get from the federal government,” has fallen from 55 percent in 2003 to 38 percent now – a sizable 17-point drop. Only 11 percent say the amount they pay is what bothers them most. What’s even more surprising is that in our current hyperpartisan environment, there isn’t much difference between the parties on this. As Pew reports:

Across party lines, relatively few feel that they are required to pay more than their fair share in federal taxes. Instead, most Republicans (56%) and Democrats (53%) say that, considering what they get from the federal government, they pay about the right amount in taxes, and a slim plurality of independents agree (49%).

So what does bother people?

Some 57 percent say the issue that bothers them most about taxes is the sense that “wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.” Another 28 percent say the complexity of the system bothers them most. And while the numbers worried about the wealthy have rise and those worried about complexity have fallen somewhat since 2003, the proportions haven’t changed that much. In 2003, 51 percent said the wealthy not paying their share was the biggest concern, and 32 percent said the complexity of the system.

In this case, however there are differences by party and income: Democrats, independents and lower-income people are more worried about the rich not paying their share, while Republicans and upper-income people are most worried about complexity.

As a society, we talk about taxes all the time, but we do it very badly. To be fair, taxes are a complex topic, but everyone has a stake in the outcome. Our politicians and the media either get too simplistic, just to win votes, or too wonky and lose people entirely.

There does seem to be momentum building in both Washington and among the public for overhauling the tax system, and that’s sorely needed. When we do that overhaul, however, the changes should be rooted in what’s actually bothering people. Yes, there are a lot of technical details to be worked out that only accountants and economists will love.

But the broader questions here are rooted in public choices about values: who should pay taxes, and how much? What kinds of taxes are fair? How much money do we need to raise for the government to be financially stable? And how complicated does the tax system have to be to achieve these goals?

Tax reform is only going to work if it addresses the concerns the public really brings to the table. Otherwise, it just becomes yet another inside-the-Beltway debate that misses the real point, both fiscally and politically.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

This was a little-noticed side effect of the bill that extended the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, signed right before Christmas. Congress decided not to include language renewing the ethanol subsidy, which expires Dec. 31 and amounts to 45 cents per gallon, or $6 billion a year.

The federal government has been subsidizing ethanol since the gas crises of the 1970s – it’s one of the few consistent, bipartisan energy policies the United States has ever had. In fact, the government has set ambitious targets for ethanol use, calling for an increase from 13 billion gallons of ethanol in 2010 to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

But one of the consistent criticisms of ethanol has been that federal support is less about making the nation more energy independent and more about the fact that Iowa hosts the first presidential caucus of the primary season. Ethanol is already big business, with a quarter of all the corn grown in the nation going to fuel. And corn is big business in Iowa.

There’s a fierce argument to be had over whether corn ethanol is really our best choice as an alternative fuel. There’s also a major question over how much difference this will really make, either to energy policy or to the deficit. Biofuels aren’t going to be the magic answer to our energy problems, at least not the biofuels we’re using right now. And while $6 billion is a lot of money, when our fiscal issues are measured in trillions, you can only see this as a small step at best.

So what’s the real significance here? Perhaps the important point is that Congress actually disengaged itself from a major interest group, in the face of fierce lobbying and potential campaign consequences. Ethanol is only a small piece of both our fiscal and energy problems. But the ability to say “no” to vested interests is going to be a huge factor if we’re ever going to tackle the truly big questions.

If letting ethanol subsidies expire means Congress has the juice to stand up to even more powerful groups, than this is a hopeful sign.

Take, for example, one point that’s come up a lot in the fight over the federal budget. It’s the principle that “no Congress can bind a future Congress.” In other words, what Congress passes today can be repealed tomorrow. The reason why politicians and commentators like to raise this with the deficit and national debt, in particular, is that it seems to explain both why nothing’s been done in the past, and why we shouldn’t expect anything to be done in the future.

You could use our current fiscal predicament as a prime example. The reason the government ended up balancing its budget in the late 1990s was because of bipartisan, consistent effort over a period of years. President George H.W. Bush and a Democratic Congress raised taxes, and President Clinton and a Republican Congress stuck to spending limits. Then, over the past decade, that Washington consensus fell apart, and so did our fiscal situation.

The same dynamic could apply to any fiscal plan we adopt now. It took us years to get into the fiscal problems we have, and our long-term problems will unfold over the next couple of decades. So we need a consistent strategy stretching over a decade or more to avert them. The critics, or if you prefer, the cynics, argue that since Congress can’t tell future Congresses what to do, you can’t trust any fiscal plan that might be enacted now. In two or five or 10 years, Congress can always reverse course, or just get tired of trying.

As a point of law, this is entirely correct. But as an excuse for fiscal irresponsibility, it’s pretty pitiful.

It’s true that Congress could pass anything or repeal anything (unless it violated the Constitution, in which case presumably the Supreme Court would pull them back). In theory, Congress could repeal all civil rights legislation, or eliminate IRAs and 401(k) plans, or decide to rely on the kindness of international strangers and disband the Army. But it doesn’t, and members of Congress don’t even think about it, because that would be insane, immoral and unpopular. In other cases, laws stay on the books even if they should be revisited, through inertia or because they’ve got the backing of vested interests.

And generally speaking, when new legislation is proposed, you don’t hear members of Congress say “let’s not bother passing this. Some future Congress will just repeal it.” Somehow this fear only applies to fiscal decisions.

The whole point of Congress passing any kind of legislation is to try and make the future better than the past. And the only way a law is secure for the future is if it’s rooted in the values of the public. Both Congress and the public have to believe a piece of legislation is right: right for now, and right for the future. When people believe that, a law sticks. When they don’t, it gets repealed.

That makes it all the more important that our spending priorities reflect the public’s values and concerns. If our current priorities are the right ones, let’s pay for them. If they’re not, let’s change them. And whatever we do, we have to make sure the public is behind it, because that’s the only way a deficit-reduction plan is going to stick.

Putting the nation on a sound fiscal course is also about ensuring the future. One of the most dangerous trends we face is that we will slowly, surely, start to lose our ability to make choices as a nation, simply because we don’t have the money. If current trends continue, in only about a decade 90 cents of every federal tax dollar will go to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt. We won’t have the ability to tend to other needs, or even the flexibility to make other choices. We’ll be locked in.

Maybe it’s true that today’s Congress can’t guarantee that scenario won’t happen. But today’s Congress is obligated to try.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

A Christmas Carol is one of the great attacks on money-grubbing in Western literature. And if you’re talking about the federal budget, then Scrooge is usually invoked as an example of cold-hearted budget cutting. A Christmas Carol’s messages seem pretty obvious: Money isn’t everything. Don’t forget the poor and starving. Miserliness never pays.

All very true.

But there’s another message here, too. One of the most famous scenes comes when the silent, relentless Ghost of Christmas Future shows Ebenezer Scrooge his own lonely grave.

“Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?” Scrooge begs. “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

If you’re looking for a subtext for our fiscal situation, that about sums it up: deciding the difference between what will be and what might be.

What may be is frightening enough to satisfy the Ghost of Christmas Future. All the government’s own budget agencies concur that we’re on an unsustainable course in the long term. In this case, the long term isn’t that far off – some results, like having every tax dollar go to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the national debt, may be only 10 years away. We’re on a path that could lead to an European-style debt crisis.

That isn’t the only risk. Our sluggish bounce back from the Great Recession could become a “lost decade” of slow growth and missed opportunities. The pain of 9 percent unemployment, mortgages under water and an increasing income gap doesn’t bode well for the future, either.

Properly guiding the federal budget is about building the future you want – and averting the future you don’t want. It’s easy, fatally easy, to lose sight of that amidst all the budget drama we’ve been having. But the budget isn’t about the next election, or getting yourself on cable news. It’s about using the money the nation has to get what Americans need most. It’s also about knowing what we have to let go. There are choices to be made, but don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t possible to both strengthen the economy now and avert the fiscal disaster later. There are a half-dozen practical plans out there that do just that, and paths to suit every ideology.

What we’re lacking is resolution: a belief that things have to change, and a willingness to make choices to make that change happen.

There are plenty in Washington who say the words, but you can’t make resolutions with your fingers crossed. The only thing that saved Scrooge is the fact that he actually did change, and change the world around him. He didn’t delegate the problem to a committee or come up with elaborate plans to force himself to be more charitable. He just did it.

Whatever fiscal future you envision, whatever ideology you prefer, requires defining the future you want, and then taking action to create it. That means setting some priorities, and letting other things go. It means making deals with those in the other party, and building public support so that any plan sticks. Anything else is just trying to fake out the ghost of Christmas future. And that’s not how you prevent the dire world of what might be from becoming the world that actually exists.

If we needed any more evidence condemning Congress’ current strategy of “let’s set a deadline and force ourselves to act,” this chart from the Pew Fiscal Analysis project makes the case. These are the fiscal decisions Congress has to make by the end of the year – and how much they cost.

Some of these may be no-brainers, but all of them would be more effective if we actually thought about them first.

This deadline strategy has driven much of the needless budget drama that we’ve had over the past year, from extending the Bush tax cuts to the debt ceiling to the supercommittee. Now we’re facing another drama, as once again Congress is headed toward a possible shutdown, an unwanted tax increase, or cuts in unemployment benefits.

In each case, the deadline hasn’t led to any real action either to control the national debt or spur the economy. The cost in public cynicism, as self-made crises come one after the other, may be far higher than the dollar amounts involved.

There are serious issues to be weighed around these ideas, like extending the payroll tax cut, indexing the alternative minimum tax to inflation, or the so-called “doc fix” to head off cuts to Medicare reimbursement. Either continuing them, or cutting them off, involves tradeoffs between different policy goals. But making tradeoffs, and getting the public on board for them, takes time. And Congress has now ensured that time is the one thing we won’t have.

We all understand crunch time, and nobody understands that better than holiday shoppers. Even so, you’re expected to put some thought into your gifts. We ought to put some thought into these fiscal priorities, too. Otherwise the whole country will end up the with equivalent of socks under the tree. Very expensive socks.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

The trouble is that the economy is so complex, with so many moving parts, that there aren’t any magic bullets. Changing one factor may help or hurt, but it doesn’t solve everything.

Take taxes, which for a lot of people are the one and only issue to worry about. For many conservatives, lower income taxes boost the economy. Period. For many progressives, raising taxes on the wealthy will reduce the deficit. Period.

That’s why it helps to compare a few charts. This one shows the top federal income tax rate, from 1970 to now.

A lot of economists argue that this top tax rate, what they call the “marginal rate,” is a crucial factor. This is what you pay on the last dollar you earn – presumably the dollar you have after paying your bills and that is available for investment or “nice to have” purchases. The more that last dollar is taxed, the less that’s available for other things. As you can see, this rate is historically low and has been for decades. (In the 1950s, the top rate was at 90 percent).

But have a look at this chart on economic growth.

The economy’s been up and down over the last 20 years, but our top tax rate has been pretty consistent. There are a whole host of factors that affect the economy, from interest rates to the labor force to globalization to those laws of supply and demand we all learned in school. Taxes are just one part of the mix. Even within the realm of taxes, different kinds of taxes have different impacts on the broader economy. Income taxes, payroll taxes, and sales taxes are all part of the picture, and they all have different impacts. The economists seem to think this is too obvious to say, and the politicians don’t say it because taxes are one of the few economic factors they can actually control. Plus, this is a subtle point to make in a political debate that rewards sound bites and short messages. You can’t get much shorter than “lower taxes.”

And this is what the deficit has looked like over the last 40 years.

We’ve run deficits when tax rates are higher and when they’re low, because of course tax rates aren’t the only factor in the budget, either. There’s how much we’re spending, as well as how much of that spending is really under the government’s control, as opposed to being driven by factors like an aging population and rising health care costs. The overall economy matters, too. When the economy slumps, tax revenues fall, no matter what the rates are, because businesses lose money and fewer people are working. When you consider how enormous our long-term budget problems are, it’s clear that raising income taxes needs to be an option – but also that it’s only likely to be part of the solution.

Obviously, income tax rates make a difference on both the economy and the budget. But in the unsubtle, anvil-like political debate we have in this country, people keep acting like this is a simple equation. Lower taxes equals a better economy; higher taxes equals lower deficits. It’s just not that simple. No matter which approach you prefer, it’s only going to work if it’s part of a larger strategy to grow the economy and get the budget under control.

You know, a plan. The thing we don’t have now.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

As a nation, we often act like our budget problems will go away once some specific policy crisis is over. You can hear this all the time, either expressly or implied, when politicians and commentators talk about the budget: “as soon as the economy recovers… as soon as the wars are over… as soon as the other party is out of power.”

But in fact, the biggest part of our fiscal challenge comes from long-term trends, changes in society that aren’t going to go away or that can’t be changed easily.

The Census Bureau laid out one of these trends in a report last week: Americans are getting older. People older than 65 are now the largest and fastest-growing part of the American population.

Specifically, the 65-and-older group is now 13 percent of the population, or 40.3 million in 2010. Overall, the number of seniors grew 15.1 percent since 2000. But the numbers do vary significantly depending on where you live. The Western states saw the fastest growth in the older population. The number of older people declined in just two places, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.

This Census chart shows the trend: we're getting older

This is a long-term, inevitable shift in the composition of the United States. Report after report, study after study, have concluded that there are two big factors behind our long-term fiscal problems. The aging of America is one of them, because more older people means more spending on Social Security and Medicare. Both programs are already spending more than they take in from payroll taxes, and are digging into the “trust funds” (which really means calling on the government to shift general revenues to pay these programs back what it owes). Unless we either raise taxes or revamp the programs to make them less costly, we’ll end up borrowing to cover their cost. That’s why these programs are the main reason the national debt will become unsustainable in the future.

The second big factor is that health care costs keep rising at about double the rate of inflation for everything else. That’s why Medicare is a much bigger challenge than Social Security, fiscally speaking. To fix that, we also need to tackle the problems throughout the health care system. The new health care reform plan is supposed to address that, but if it doesn’t work, we’ll need to come up with something else. But at least, on paper, with the right policies, we can change the course of health care costs.

An aging population is another matter. We can’t change this trend. Nor can we fail to provide for our seniors. It would be wrong, and the American people won’t stand for it.

So what can we do? Deal with it. Pay for it.

For Social Security, at least, there are lots of not-particularly-complicated options to keep the system solvent and manage its impact on the overall budget. The options aren’t painless, it’s true: Paying higher taxes. Retiring later. Changing how benefits are calculated so that future retirees get less. But the sooner we pick our options, the easier it will be.

We can’t change the trend. We can only change how we respond to it. And ignoring it is not an option.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

The National Journal reports that many budget hawks aren’t giving up on pushing for change in 2012. The conventional wisdom has been that the supercommittee was the last best chance to come up with a thoughtful fiscal plan before the presidential election. Once a campaign gets going, the argument goes, nobody actually solves problems in American politics. They just talk about solving them. Campaigning and government are both full-time jobs, and during an election year, campaigning wins.

But that’s an opportunity, too, because counterintuitively, our fiscal problems still need talking over – just not in the way we’ve been going about it.

The presidential campaign is a chance to talk about priorities: what’s important to us as a country and what challenges we need to tackle. How we raise and spend our tax money flows from that.

Right now, the federal government spends two-thirds of its money on just five things: Social Security, defense, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the money we’ve already borrowed.

Three of those items are going to keep getting more expensive because of social forces we either can’t or won’t get a handle on: an aging population and health care costs that consistently rise at twice the rate of inflation. Even if we wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as planned, defense will continue to be a huge cost area unless we take a hard, pragmatic look at our global commitments. And if we don’t solve any of these other problems, we’ll end up borrowing more and more money, which means interest payments will explode, too.

The poisonous, partisan refusal to compromise in Washington is only one of the reasons why we haven’t solved our fiscal problems. Another is that the American people aren’t quite ready to apply a basic life lesson to this problem: you can’t have everything. And when you can’t have everything, you’ve got to decide what you want most.

What we could do in a presidential campaign is have the candidates raise some basic questions: is this the government we really want? If not, what priorities should be on the list? And how do we pay for it?

That’s not what we’re actually getting. There’s no question, of course, that our fiscal situation will be an issue in the campaign, and that we’re already seeing lots of proposals put forth, with varying degrees of fiscal realism. On the whole, however, our elections are mostly about people, and who we want to hire as our political leaders. But they also can and should be on opportunity to set priorities, and have a realistic discussion about how we pay for those priorities.

No matter who wins the election, without a clear set of national priorities we’ll never get our budget on track – and we’ll never actually get what we want out of government.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”

Lots of people thought the panel was a bad idea to start with, on both left and right. One argument is that the supercommittee sessions may have actually moved Washington policymakers closer to common ground on a few issues, like changes to Medicare, even if the politicians didn’t make it all the way to a compromise in time.

That would certainly be useful if true. But partisan gridlock in Washington is only part of the problem. Yes, Congress has to pass a plan and the president has to sign it – but then the American public has to be persuaded to live with it. Moving the American public closer to compromise and common ground needs to be part of the process. One of the (many) flaws of the supercommittee idea was that it made no allowance for persuading the public about the value of its plan, even if it had succeeded in creating one. Moving the Washington debate forward is not the same as advancing the public’s willingness to set priorities and make choices. And no budget plan will survive unless the public is willing to get behind the priorities it sets.

The second argument that’s very intriguing is that Congress has now set things up so that further gridlock will actually encourage deficit reduction. When you count up the spending cuts agreed to earlier this year, the $1.2 trillion in “automatic trigger” cuts set off by the supercommittee’s failure, and the expiration of the extended Bush tax cuts at the end of 2013, you get $6 trillion in deficit reduction that will go into effect if Congress just sits on its hands.

There’s been a lot of talk about how this shifts the deficit debate in favor of the Democrats rather than the Republicans (because this do-nothing plan ends up raising a lot of revenue and cutting defense spending). But the more significant point may be that for the first time, the political “default setting” favors controlling the deficit. Usually, it’s easier to run deficits and let the national debt build than to rein it in; there’s a reason why the U.S. government has run deficits in 31 out of the last 35 years. Now the default setting would bring about a bigger deficit reduction plan than anything the supercommittee might have produced.

Yet is the hands-off approach really likely to happen?

People often accuse Congress of being a “do-nothing” institution, and certainly the body gridlocks on a lot of problems. On the whole, however. Congress would rather be seen to be doing something rather than nothing; that’s how politicians get re-elected. What they want to avoid is doing anything that’s going to cause the American public pain: like, for example, spending cuts and tax increases. Pain is unpopular. So the real motivation isn’t doing nothing; it’s feeling nothing. It’s continuing to maintain the fiction that we can have fiscal responsibility without anyone having to pay more taxes, or get less from government.

Avoiding that kind of pain is a powerful motivator for politicians, even if letting the triggers go into effect and the Bush tax cuts expire is theoretically “easier.” Plus, letting these changes go into effect by default is not the best strategy for persuading the public that they’re necessary and morally right. There’s just as much work involved in persuading people to sacrifice by default as by design – perhaps more. And if that really is our best option for getting on a sound fiscal path, someone has to start making that counterintuitive case to the public. Doing nothing may well be the right thing to do, but it usually feels wrong.

Scott Bittle is a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a partner in Choosing Our Fiscal Future. With his colleague Jean Johnson, he’s co-author of “Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis” and “Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.”