'Supercommittee' - Super Dud - Super Scam :: Political News and commentaries

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November 21, 2011

'Supercommittee' - Super Dud - Super Scam

Topics: Political News and commentaries

Over at The American Spectator, Jed Babbin sums up what practically every conservative knew all along about the so-called "super committee": It's much worse than being just a dud, it's a supper scam ...

... The news media are talking about it in mild terms. They know the unspeakable secret: that whatever the result, success or failure, cuts or sequestration, the supercommittee results won't take effect until 2013.

That's right: the whole thing was set up to give the appearance of spending cuts without the reality. And to give Congress another whole year to mess around with the results. It was a put-up job aimed to increase the debt ceiling without forcing Congress to actually do anything that cuts federal spending.

In short, it was a scam.

I'm not sure whose more nuts, the Republicans in Congress that were elected to reduce the deficit and then failed miserably by letting themselves be snookered by the Democrats ... or we conservatives that elected them believing that they were smart enough, and sufficiently committed to reducing the debt, to do the job that they were sent to Washington to do.

On the other hand, Ross Kaminsky makes a damn good point:

It's not that I'm opposed to movement to fix our very serious fiscal issues. Rather it's that the only possible deal from a committee which includes John Kerry (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) is a bad deal. We should consider ourselves fortunate that Democrats weren't smart enough to say yes to Republicans' attempt to cave in on taxes. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) asked rhetorically "Do we look stupid?" In fact, they now do -- though they're probably not smart enough to realize it.

It's taken years to screw up our finances this badly. Another 14 months isn't going to make it that much worse.

And as Kaminsky aptly notes, the root of the problem is not the deficit; it's not even the taxes. It's the spending:

... as Milton Friedman taught us, government will spend as much money as it takes in, plus however much more it can get away with. Thus the idea of raising taxes as budgetarily beneficial is simply a dangerous misdirection. Increasing tax rates -- which always generates less increased revenue than the CBO's static modelers predict -- will reduce spending cuts by reducing the need for politicians to make hard decisions.

... Focusing on the budget deficit is like focusing on a magician's waving right hand while he slides the card from his sleeve with his left. Of course he wants you to focus on the right hand, but an experienced watcher of magic won't be fooled. If you want to get our fiscal house in order, therefore, do not focus on the deficit -- the Democrats' waving hand -- but on spending.

If we're aiming to cut 4 trillion dollars of deficit, for example, as the Simpson-Bowles Commission suggested, then a plan that is even one-quarter tax increases lets the politicians off the hook as far as finding a trillion dollars of spending cuts.

Rather than compromise with Democrats just for the sake of getting something done, let's aim to oust Democrats from control of anything in Washington and then put a good plan in place.

There's simply no alternative if our Republic is to survive. Times have changed, and today's Democrats are an entirely knew breed:

... in most of our past, the minority party was the loyal opposition. Today's Democrats (only the minority in the House, to be clear) are the tools of radical leftists from environmentalists to union thugs and of statists and parasites like teachers' unions and trial lawyers. They are loyal to those special interests regardless of cost to the nation and should therefore be excluded from influencing power over important policy and regulation to the greatest degree possible.

It is the Republicans' job to make voters understand that -- a hard sale for a party that barely a decade ago was as unworthy of voter support as today's Democrats are and which still hasn't convinced many of us that their reborn fiscal sanity evangelism is heartfelt. (Every episode such as their trying to "compromise" with John Kerry makes their commitment less credible.)

Cutting to the quick of the matter, the only cure for our deficit problem is to not only get the spender-in-chief out of the White House in 2012, but also kick enough Democrats out of office that will enable the far more rational conservatives to bring us back from the brink of national insolvency and complete loss of our exceptionalism and ability to defend ourselves.

Posted by Hyscience at November 21, 2011 7:22 AM

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