To say the super committee is under a time crunch may be the biggest political understatement this fall—especially given the group’s growing, hypothetical to-do list of deficit reduction, tax reform, and job creation.

At the first meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction on Sept. 8, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., acknowledged as much when he laid out an even starker timeline for the group’s work. Really, they need to finish their proposal by the end of October, Kyl said, to give the Congressional Budget Office time to score the plan.

“We have about six weeks to construct the package,” he told fellow members.
But the idea that the super committee needs to “construct” anything is false.

All they need to do is cut and paste, or to use the appropriate Internet-era vocabulary, “curate” and “aggregate.” A myriad of smart tax, budget, and deficit reduction proposals from both sides of the political aisle have circulated around Washington for years: from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s plan to the Gang of Six, Simpson-Bowles, Domenici-Rivlin—and that’s just the most recent ones.

There is no grand deficit-reduction idea lurking in the dark corners of a think tank, in the drawer of some obscure academic, or inside the mind of a brilliant, underpaid Hill policy staffer. The only oxygen missing to light the match is political will.

“People who work on this, like economists, know there’s plenty of good stuff out there,” said Jon Bakija, a professor of economics at Williams College, who in 2005 worked on a tax reform plan under President George W. Bush. “We need to have a rational discussion that’s not all attack ads.”

The Simpson-Bowles Commission; the Domenici-Rivlin Task Force; Ryan, R-Wis.; and President Obama all released deficit reduction proposals, which in great detail, outlined ways they would shift discretionary and defense spending, reform entitlement programs, and change the individual and corporate tax rates.

Take tax reform as a starting point: Three out of the four plans, excluding Obama’s, suggest eliminating all or most of an individual’s tax deductions and credits. Simpson-Bowles, Domenici-Rivlin, and Ryan wanted to cut the corporate tax rate, so it falls somewhere between 25 percent and 28 percent.
The four proposals also offer roughly 22 ideas for overhauling health care, including Medicare and Medicaid. Sure, they differ ideologically. The Republican Budget chairman’s pitch is to repeal most provisions of the last year’s health reform law, while Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin suggest expanding managed care for dual eligibles. Politics aside, that’s a lot of ideas for the super committee to consider.

Rather than learn the contours of the deficit reduction debate from scratch, or call in witnesses, such as the ever-patient CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, to again reiterate the United States’ dangerous economic path, the super committee should focus on innovation and creativity in the way they structure their idea rather than worrying about creating new content from scratch.

“The opportunities for them to do anything innovative policy wise seems low,” says Donald Marron, director of the Tax Policy Center. “That’s not a poor reflection on them.”

“The innovative part comes in crafting interesting combinations of ideas that legislatively can see the light of day,” Marron added. “There is lots of room for creativity for deciding how to do those things.”