Tom Brokaw

After last year's budget failures, lawmakers gather for annual deficit pep talk

Government leaders past and present gathered in Washington to do what they do best about the nation's deficit woes: talk.

At an annual "fiscal summit" Tuesday in a capital city that seems almost comically unable to function, much less take action to trim benefit programs and defense spending or raise taxes to close a crippling budget gap, a crowd of the converted listened to Washington elite: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, members of a failed deficit "supercommittee" and the chairman and top Democrat on the House Banking Committee.There was universal agreement. The deficit is bad and Washington really, really needs to fix it. Fast.What was lacking was any agreement on how to do it, and certainly no expectation that the warring tribes in Washington will do anything meaningful to tackle trillion-dollar deficits before the fall elections.The summit is hosted by Pete Peterson, who has staked $1 billion of his Wall Street f...

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