NOW, FOR SOME LEADERSHIP If Congress fails to rein in the deficit, it will be because of a lack of political courage -- not any shortage of ideas out there on how to get the job done. Since the midterm election, two bipartisan panels have issued thought-provoking plans. The first is a draft proposal from the co-chairmen of President Barack Obama's fiscal commission. The second is from a panel at the Bipartisan Policy Center, founded by former Senate leaders. We believe the Bipartisan Center's plan amplifies the strong aspects of the commission's draft while correcting for some of its shortcomings. Both tell hard truths about the choices ahead -- more than we heard from the politicians in this year's campaign. Here is a review and comparison of some of the important aspects: Getting Started -- Both recognize that the recovery is fragile and delay their start dates until 2012. Without more stimulus now, the economy is unlikely to be strong enough even then to absorb budget cuts. The Bipartisan Policy Center fixes that by calling first for more stimulus, with budget cuts starting a year later. Raising Taxes -- Both plans rightly call for higher taxes to tame the budget and would lower income tax rates while modifying or ending most deductions and other breaks. In the White House commission's proposal, tax revenue would cover only about one-third of the deficit reduction; spending cuts would have to account for two-thirds. The Bipartisan Center's plan has a roughly even split. It also calls for phasing in a 6.5-percent national sales tax, along with provisions to protect lower-income taxpayers. The new sales tax would promote growth by raising adequate revenue without taxing savings. Cutting Spending -- Both say what the politicians won't: To bring outlays in line with revenues, defense, Social Security and Medicare must all be cut. We believe the commission's draft is fundamentally flawed, because it sets an arbitrary spending target of 21 percent of the economy. That would make it impossible to meet the future needs of a growing and aging population and to achieve other goals, like improving education. The Bipartisan Policy Center avoids arbitrary limits. Rather, as spending and tax changes kick in, outlays can rise as a share of the economy. The center's plan is also sounder on Social Security, ensuring the system's long-term solvency with a generally modest mix of benefit reductions and tax increases that protects middle-income retirees. The commission's plan relies too heavily on benefit cuts for those retirees. Unfortunately, in dealing with the most difficult problem -- the inexorable rise in spending on Medicare and Medicaid -- the two plans would result in unacceptable reductions in benefits for people of modest means or stiff (for them) payment increases. The best long-term solution is to make the delivery of medical care much more efficient. That is a major goal of the new reform law, which is starting an array of pilot projects in Medicare and Medicaid. Congress needs to accelerate this effort, not look for ways -- as Republicans are -- to repeal or obstruct the new law. The Obama fiscal commission is now reworking its draft. If 14 of 18 commissioners vote for a final version, the package will be sent to Congress in December. We don't know if the commission will reach a consensus or if the final version will be improved enough to warrant congressional approval. Obama's disturbing silence on his commission's efforts -- while members of his party take political shots -- makes it even less likely the commissioners will agree on a worthwhile final draft. Meanwhile Congress is moving in exactly the wrong direction. Republicans are bent on letting unemployment benefits expire, lessening the chances that the economy will be ready for deficit cutting by 2012. And those supposedly deficit-minded Republicans are pushing to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts. That would add $4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years, the same amount the commission has proposed to cut. The Democrats are doing only slightly better. They want to extend the middle-class tax cuts permanently -- which would add $3.2 trillion to the debt over 10 years. They do not seem inclined to fight the Republicans very hard. If lawmakers -- of both parties -- were serious about the deficit, they would let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, extend the tax cuts for the middle class for a year or so and reform the tax system in the meantime. There is no way to reduce the deficit without strong leadership from Obama and honest cooperation from the Republicans. The ideas are out there. Now we are waiting for the politicians. RUSSIA'S DICTATORSHIP OF LAW Russia's newly outrageous legal treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the country's largest oil company, is a reminder that Russia has yet to grasp the idea of equal justice under law -- especially when the Kremlin decides someone is in the way. Khodorkovsky was convicted in 2005 on trumped-up charges of fraud and disobeying a court order and lost his company to Kremlin loyalists. Russians call his sort of case 'telephone law,' imposed by the politically powerful through a call to the courthouse. With his sentence almost up, he was just tried again on suspect charges of embezzling and money-laundering. The judge is expected to reach a decision in December. Two decades ago, the U.S. State Department urged the new Russia to resurrect the jury system, as The Times described this week, to put the law in the hands of the Russian people. Juries had been abolished after the Soviet revolution, along with anything recognizable as courts and lawyers. They were reborn in 1993. Defendants have a right to a jury trial in a small fraction of crimes like murder and kidnapping. Compared with non-jury trials in the Soviet era, when the acquittal rate was likely less than 1 percent, the rate with juries has climbed to between 15 and 20 percent. Because of this apparent success, it is tempting to look for the growth of a familiar sense of justice. That search ends in disillusionment. The Soviet system relied on prosecutors to find what passed for the truth in criminal cases, so the foundation for reform is at odds with the new system that juries are part of, with truth supposedly emerging from the competing accounts of the prosecution and the defense. More to the point, the old system is not dead. Russia, the scholar Jeffrey Kahn said, has 'a lot of bad legal habits.' One is the prosecutor's 'case file,' which sealed the guilt of countless Soviet citizens and retains its terrifying force. Of the 791,802 criminal cases disposed of this year through September, only 465 were decided by a jury. Khodorkovsky wasn't allowed a jury in either of his trials. Deliberately, the prosecution charged him only with crimes that didn't give that right. A jury couldn't be trusted, apparently, to look out for the state's interests. When Vladimir Putin heralded the start of the era of law and democracy, he repeatedly described it as 'the dictatorship of law.' As the Khodorkovsky case dramatizes, that is a chillingly accurate description. THE LESSON FROM CHARLES RANGEL It was painful watching Rep. Charles Rangel face censure in the House last week. But the wounds were self-inflicted. The evidence proved that Rangel, a New York City Democrat, repeatedly and arrogantly cut ethical corners, solicited favors and failed to pay his taxes. He still might have skated if he hadn't made a show of proclaiming innocence and demanding an investigation, finally rousing the usually somnolent ethics committee. Given the outcome, we suspect that future violators are not likely to be so obviously self-defeating. They will be more cunning. That is all the more reason why the new House leadership should keep and strengthen the quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics, created by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. The office has worked to stiffen the committee's spine, by reviewing complaints, recommending which require a deeper look by the House panel, and -- gasp -- issuing public reports. The more it worked, the more House members wanted to neuter it or kill it off. The new speaker, John Boehner, is reportedly ready to comply. But riding in like the cavalry comes the Ohio Liberty Council, the umbrella organization for 58 Tea Party groups in Boehner's home state. Flush with ballot power, it is warning Republican leaders that Tea Party loyalists will not stand by silent at any attempt to weaken the ethics office. 'They should be as transparent as they can be,' Chris Littleton, the council president, advises the new Congress. Transparency, Boehner, a radical and welcome demand from your new Tea Party partners. We wholeheartedly concur. TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT THOSE CIGARETTE LABELS Starting in 2012, cigarette packages and advertisements will have to carry new warning labels that pound home the message that smoking sickens and kills. The message isn't new, but it will be presented in a bigger, starker format -- including images of tobacco's devastating effects -- that should be more difficult to ignore than the tiny, text-only warning labels that have lost their punch. The current labels, tucked away on the side of packages or the corner of advertisements, have not been changed in a quarter-century. And smoking rates, which had been dropping for decades, have flattened out in recent years. One in five adults and high school students are smokers. A 2009 law gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. It requires that the new warnings must cover the top half of both the front and the back of cigarette packs and 20 percent of cigarette advertisements. Manufacturers will also be required to use FDA-approved images. The agency recently unveiled 36 possible images, from which it will choose nine. None are quite as ghastly as those used abroad, but they are powerful, including a sickly man exhaling smoke through a breathing hole in his neck, a mother blowing smoke onto her baby, a corpse with a toe tag, a diseased lung. The Obama administration's new tobacco control strategy also includes a national media campaign, expanded access to smoking cessation programs, insurance coverage through Medicare and Medicaid to pay the cost, grants to states and communities to pay for tobacco prevention and cessation programs, and increased research to define what works best. The tobacco industry is still spending billions to promote its products. Every weapon should be used to reduce the carnage. 