President Obama has announced creation of a bipartisan commission to come up with ways to deal with the rapidly rising federal budget deficit. And he named two respected pros as co-chairs, former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and the former No. 2 Republican in the Senate, Alan Simpson.

Everybody agrees that the deficit is a serious problem. The annual red ink now stands at a record $1.4 trillion and, on course to surpass 10 percent of gross domestic product, is a genuine threat to our economic well-being.

However, it is not being overly pessimistic to suggest that this is a doomed enterprise. The solutions are there. The think tanks and watchdog groups are full of them.

What is lacking is the political will on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, two days before the president’s announcement, the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform, along with the equally blue-ribbon Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, held a daylong session on how to avoid a government-debt crisis.

The commission boasts, accurately, that its board is “made up of the country’s most seasoned federal budget policymakers.” One of them is former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, now Obama’s top adviser on economic recovery.

The fate of the president’s commission was settled late last month when Congress rejected, 53-46, a deficit-reduction commission of its own. The vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to surmount the inevitable Republican filibuster. Adopting deficit-reduction recommendations might have been difficult because, like the president’s planned panel, the congressional panel would have required a 14-vote bipartisan supermajority of the 18 members. But everything – cuts in Social Security and Medicare, tax increases – would have been on the table.

And here’s the crucial difference between Obama’s panel and the failed congressional panel: Once the congressional commission adopted its recommendations, the lawmakers would have been required to come back after the November elections and vote on them. In other words, Congress would have had to actually do something about the deficit other than blame the other party.

The presidential panel can only urge Congress to act on its recommendations. It is, in effect, an advisory commission.

A coalition of federal budget think tanks laid down a set of requirements – broad mandate, no preconditions, transparency – for Obama’s initiative to be successful. One of them was that Congress absolutely must vote on the recommendations: “Absent this element, the report would join many others on a shelf.”

One thing Washington has a lot of is shelf space.