EASY DEALS TO BE STRUCK:

While Reagan's 1981 budget and tax cuts passed with some Democrat support, two other achievements were strong bipartisan efforts from beginning to end.

The first was in 1983, when Reagan worked with Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill to avert the imminent insolvency of Social Security and gradually raised the retirement age to 67 from 65. Such a bipartisan effort today could begin with President Obama's proposal to change the consumer price index now used to adjust Social Security benefits for inflation so the CPI more accurately measures the impact of inflation on purchasing power. President Clinton made similar changes to the CPI in 1998. That change alone would strengthen Social Security and reduce the deficit by $232 billion over the next decade. Additionally, everyone knows that Social Security's normal retirement age must gradually be raised to 70 from 67, and the sooner this happens, the more secure everyone's benefits will be.

The second bipartisan effort was a revenue-neutral tax reform in 1986 that lowered the top marginal tax rate to 28% from 50%, consolidated 14 different rates into two tax brackets, reduced special-interest provisions, increased efficiency and spurred economic growth. The law passed with strong support from Democrats like Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt, and the votes of 70% of Democrats in the House and Senate. The tax reform gave a second wind to the 1982 expansion. A similar reform today would spur growth and swell revenues.

President Clinton faced a Republican Congress for his final six years. This did not preclude achieving a bipartisan reform of federal welfare in 1996 and the Balanced Budget Act in 1997. Repeating the 1997 BBA spending restraint agreed to by President Clinton and the GOP Congress, adjusted for the size of today's government, would save $1.9 trillion over the next decade.

The Congressional Budget Office projected in 1996 that the balanced budget plan would generate a "fiscal dividend" of some $254 billion in total deficit reduction during 1996-2002, but the CBO later found that the actual deficit reduction from surging revenues alone totaled $1.267 trillion, five times the original projection. This triggered a balanced budget much sooner than anyone forecast and huge, totally unexpected budget surpluses.

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