It’s pretty interesting that, while today’s elections are important, many consequential events will happen in the month or so after the elections. Tomorrow, we’ll see the extent of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing plan. The Pentagon study on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell comes out December 1, which could affect that policy. There’s a lame duck session with a host of important issues, like the Bush tax cuts, on the docket. The 50-state AG investigation of foreclosure fraud could move toward a decision. And the cat food commission will meet shortly after the elections, trying to satisfy a December 1 deadline for recommendations. The New York Times story reveals that the commission has deliberately said almost nothing in public about their plans, and that the commission has all major budget pieces “on the table”:

Amid that partisan backdrop, people in both parties say they have been surprised that the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform reached an early consensus to put all three major budget parts on the table: taxes, annual spending for domestic and military programs, and the entitlement benefit programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Still, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to changes in benefits, expectations are low that any plan can get the 14-vote supermajority required to send it to Congress for a vote in December. Advocates’ best hope seems to be that the co-chairmen — Erskine B. Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system and a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader from Wyoming — can negotiate a package that attracts a sizable minority of the 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans and provides a framework for future bipartisan action.

“We’re going to put a very serious proposal out there that lots of people will find areas to pick at,” Mr. Bowles said. “But in total it will address this deficit problem that we face, and will lay a predicate out there for what the country has to do to get its fiscal house in order.”

The goalposts moving to “sizable minority” is actually pretty good for the prospects of the commission, if like me you think it’s stacked with deficit scolds tilted toward taking away cherished benefits than tax fairness.

Nevertheless, there is some lip service paid to cutting tax expenditures, the tax breaks that politicians hand out like free bread before a restaurant meal. Tom Coburn snipes at the tax break for corn ethanol, as if any lawmaker with dreams of the Iowa caucuses would dare touch that. In addition, Jackie Calmes mentions four tax expenditures (mortgage interest deduction, state and local tax deduction, charitable giving deduction and the employer health insurance deduction) that similarly have no shot of changing. The President put capping the charitable deduction on the table during the health care debate, and his own party made minced meat of it.

There’s similar lip service toward military spending cuts, and again that is something I’ll believe when I see.

Alice Rivlin then says that Medicare and Medicaid won’t get touched because there’s “health care fatigue,” meaning the only entitlement programs where you can credibly claim an actual long-run deficit issue won’t get mentioned by the deficit commission. Leaving us with Social Security, the “building block” for hand-shaking between elites to cut your retirement benefits.

While Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson will propose health policy changes for the commission’s deliberations, Social Security is getting more of the members’ attention. Republicans are more inclined to scale back future retirees’ benefits than are Democrats, especially since liberal groups have mobilized in opposition. Especially controversial is the idea of raising the retirement age for full benefits; currently it is being increased gradually to 67 under a 1983 law.

Other options include less generous formulas for both initial benefits and annual cost-of-living increases for retirees in future decades. Democrats say any compromise to assure Social Security’s solvency for the next 75 years would have to include increased payroll tax revenues as well as changes in benefits. The likeliest revenue option would raise the cap on wages subject to payroll taxes, now $106,800.

As Dean Baker says, these are major issues that should be decided in elections, not outsourced to a panel that studiously avoids any public scrutiny. In addition, as you see above, there’s some mention of “less generous formulas for initial benefits.” In other words, your grandmother or aunt or current retiree may see cuts to their Social Security check, immediately. It’s a bit unclear, but that appears to be the meaning.

The next two months should be unusually packed with important policy decisions, in a way more so than the following two years.