The commission's two co-chairmen are former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, an unabashed liberal who cheered President Clinton's tax increases that pushed the effective top tax rates to more than 40 percent, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming who voted against President Reagan's 1986 tax cuts and supported George H.W. Bush's tax hike that pushed Reagan's top 28 percent rate to 31 percent and raised payroll taxes on the middle class.
The commission's executive director is former Clinton White House domestic adviser Bruce Reed, on leave as president of the Democratic Leadership Council, who is hostile to across-the-board tax rate cuts and a loyal Obama partisan.
Backing them up is a gang of Democratic tax-and-spend liberals who are the least likely to come up with a full-blown plan to slow the growth in government and reduce spending. All are major supporters of Obama's big spending plans and supporters of his plans to raise taxes.
They include Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin; the arch-liberal Democratic whip, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota; Alice Rivlin of the liberal Brookings Institution; and union leader Andy Stern, former president of the far-left Service Employees International Union, who has been a close Obama adviser.
House Democrats include Reps. John Spratt of South Carolina, Xavier Becerra of California and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. A few of Obama's rich Democratic donors round out the list.
The six Republican members are conservative tax-cutters with a known reputation as deficit hawks, including Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, whom the Democrats call "Dr. No," and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a Jack Kemp-type growth Republican who is pushing market-oriented ideas to shrink the unsustainable costs of Social Security and Medicare entitlements.
Obama and his friends on the commission want people to think that the chief problem with mounting deficits is not enough tax revenue, when too much spending is the cause.
In fact, "by 2020, more than 95 percent of the expanded budget deficit will result from higher-than-average spending, and less than 5 percent will be from lower-than-average revenues," the Heritage Foundation's chief budget analyst Brian Riedl told me.
Americans instinctively understand this, which is why the Democrats' irresponsible spending binge will be a paramount political issue in the midterm elections to come. The bumper sticker of the year will be "Throw the spenders out."