• By   • Charles Forelle  Little is truly new in the Franco-
German compromise letter (link in French) on economic governance
(or government, or whatever you want to call it). Much of what
is proposed–budgetary peer-review, stronger statistics–is
material that forms the backbone of the Van Rompuy task force’s
announced positions.  There is a new nugget on the testy issue
of how to punish budgetary miscreants in the euro zone. Germany
has long called for countries that repeatedly run big deficits
to lose some of their voting rights at the European Union’s
decision-making table.  AFP/Getty Images Tour de France: A model
for EU rule making?  Trouble is, this would require a change to
the EU’s treaties, which is a lengthy and unpleasant process
that no one is keen to undergo. So the letter proposes an
interim step: Other countries could make a political agreement
simply to not listen to anything a fiscal scofflaw has to say,
either by sending the country to the dunce’s corner during
discussions, or by making a pol