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Redstate...
GOP
Picks for Super Duper Committee
Won’t Make a Difference
Forget about the tax issue; what
happened to the spending cuts?
Posted by Daniel Horowitz
Wednesday,
August 10th
Well,
the much anticipated picks for
the debt deal Super Committee have been announced.
There will be much ink spilled over who was
chosen and who was rejected. However,
the salient point is not the orientation of the committee, but the
entire
premise behind the committee itself.
Many
conservatives will laud the
choice of Pat Toomey for the committee; others will decry the pick of
light
bulb ban man, Fred Upton. The
reality is
that none of this matters.
The
Democrats have picked three
radical leftists in the Senate, and are expected to follow suit with
their
House picks. There
is no way that
Democrats on the committee will ever support meaningful spending cuts,
repeal
of Obamacare, or entitlement reform.
Harry Reid made sure to keep the likes of Kent
Conrad and Mark Warner –
senators, who have expressed some support for minor entitlement reforms
– off
the committee.
Even
if the committee would
miraculously approve some real spending cuts, does anyone really
believe that
Obama would support the recommendations more than he did Simpson-Bowles? That blue-ribbon panel
identified policy
changes that both parties liked and hated; it called for some cuts and
entitlement reform – and more taxes; nevertheless, Obama threw his own
commission under the bus. We
are really
to believe that Obama would approve a commission report that calls for
good
entitlement reforms with or without tax hikes?
Let’s
be charitable for a moment and
presume that Fred Upton will never support tax increases. We must also anticipate
that if he does
support a tax increase, Boehner will be tenacious enough to whip up the
votes
against it. Keep in
mind that he is
forced to schedule a vote on the committee’s recommendations. But again, let’s assume
that the tax hikes
are defeated. Is
this the best we can do
from a deal that was supposed to be a harbinger for sweeping spending
cuts? It is
pathetic that the best we
can say from our own deal, fueled by our own leverage, is that “at
least we
were spared from tax increases.” No
kidding! The best
we can hope for from
our own leverage is that we won’t pass more imprudent legislation? Weren’t we supposed to use
our leverage to
gain ground by reducing the size of government?
Instead
of gaining ground with
spending cuts, we will actually lose ground with this ridiculous super
committee. We can
appoint Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Rand
Paul, Jim Jordan, Michele Bachmann, and Jeff Flake to the committee –
and it
still won’t matter. The
new committee
will be as ephemeral as Simpson-Bowles.
After the excitement surrounding the
selections dies down, the committee
will be deadlocked, triggering the sequestration process. But that’s a good thing,
isn’t it?
Nope.
This
sequestration cuts 50% from
defense spending, while exempting all welfare programs from the process. We must remember that much
of the
discretionary cuts triggered from the first tranche will also include
defense
cuts. Some
of the remaining cuts will
come from the government’s obligations to healthcare providers. That’s some concession
from Obama. More
precisely, it appears that he will be
able to have his cake and eat it too.
The
real problem has very little to do
with the orientation of the committee.
The problem all along was this ridiculous debt
deal that failed to
preclude a credit downgrade, limit government, or curb entitlements. Worse, it will cut from
the few areas that
the federal government is actually responsible to support.
But
fear not; at the very least, we
won’t incur tax hikes – or, will we?
Read
it at Redstate
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