The Super Committee: Personnel Is Policy
The six Republicans on the committee — Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl, Senators Pat Toomey and Rob Portman, Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, and House Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling — seem a strong enough group, with middling to strong records in support of an agenda to spark economic growth. The Democrats on the committee, on the other hand, are largely less than stellar, with a long record of support for entitlements and a concern for politics that seems to override their passion for federal budgeting issues.
Take Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic co-chairman of the committee. At the same time that she is trying to find $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, she is busy raising money for the 2012 election as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Most political forecasters expect the GOP to take control of the Senate in the next election, regardless of the outcome of the presidential race. This means Murray must face the conflict, every day, between coming up with real reforms that might help the country but hurt her party and the need to win as many Democratic campaigns as possible.
The other Democrats on the super committee — with the exception of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus — do not have a reputation for being budget hawks either. Sen. John F. Kerry and U.S. Reps. Xavier Becerra and James Clyburn are partisans through and through who no doubt believe their mission is to protect vital Democratic constituencies from the brunt of the coming cuts. Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, is still better known as a recent — and successful — chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, putting him in the same boat where partisan politics are concerned as Murray.
The biggest danger is that, rather than try to do something simple and straightforward, the so-called “super committee” will continue to try to come up with some kind of grand bargain that ends up being too clever by half and only makes problems worse. Already there are rumors about efforts to do something to the corporate tax code that would eliminate deductions but also lower rates — something that is sorely needed but is best done out in the open through the full committee process, not behind closed doors. Indeed the whole process, as more than one member of Congress has already suggested, ought to be out in the open. Transparency is the enemy of business as usual and it ought to be very much in evidence as the work of the “super committee’ begins.
The ‘super committee’ will produce nothing passable and so the options are the default cuts (highly unlikely) or the modified kind of polished turd that only a congress with a 13% approval rating will likely produce. Speaker Boehner, what you produce as an alternate may be polished, but the question will be what is it that you are polishing.
Gee. Here they go again.
The “deal” is a win-win-win for Obama and team. No question. They’re chumming the waters while Obama in at Martha Vineyard in prep for his pre-polled, focus grouped economic campaign speech.
The GOP, bless their blinders, will get slaughtered on this one. September-October-November. MSM bash and trash.
How to surf the financial and stock markets the remainder of this year will not be for the faint of heart.
The fact that Reid’s first three choices for the “super committee” were Baucus, Kerry, and Murray, shows that the Dems are still out for more Massive Spending On Programs Everybody Wants.
They not only will not work on spending cuts, I predict they won’t even consider reducing the rate of increase to match incoming revenues. More likely, they already have new “programs” planned to eat up any and all increased income. And then will want to go out and tax and borrow yet more.
I used to think they simply could not reason outside of the strictures of Keynesian economics. Then, I came to suspect that they just liked spending other people’s money.
Now, I am very close to concluding that they just want to watch everything go down in flames, with as much misery for the public as possible, to punish the rest of us for not thinking like them.
Either that, or they just think that hurting people is fun.
clear ether
eon
Eon, While I was trying to organize my thoughts, you were already expressing them – and eloquently.
Instead of calling them super committee why didn’t they just call them the Politburo ?
I call it “Boehner’s Boner.”
When I heard Gingrich I too thought this was creative and useful. The word he used was that Congressional committees represented on that super committee, almost pre-empt its work by presenting plans that could conceivably get passed by Congress as a whole.
No one at this website will agree, but I also think that Republicans need to READ THAT WHOLE REPORT by Standard & Poor (stop accepting Bachmann’s reaction to it) and realize that whatever happens in November, result will lead to further downgrade of SP rating if it does not correct what led to first downgrade.
Way into the report – page 4 I blieve – SP specifically NAMES the Republican Party as responsible for downgrade by turning what has been routine (raising debt ceiling) into political brinkmanship, and Democrats for then approving what end result was.
They specifically NAME the one Obama/Boehner deal that WOULD HAVE met standards for retaining triple AAA.
Bachmann is a piece of work! Takes CREDIT for being tip of the spear in all this, but then doesn’t accept blame for end result – lowering triple A rating.She evades any responsibility by saying “I offered a bill etc.” – FAct is nobody was going to pass her bill! She knew that and never did vote to raise the debt ceiling. She never did answer direct question: “If yours was the single vote that determined whether to raise the debt ceiling or not–how would you vote?” It isn’t that reporters didn’t TRY to get it out of her.
There will be specific quid pro quo for end result of November commission–second lowering of SP rating or not–so NO ONE can claim ignorance as to what will happen–more downgrade–if result does not meet SP criteria specifically laid out in first downgrade.
‘There will be specific quid pro quo for end result of November commission–second lowering of SP rating or not’
I disagree.
I think comrade Holder will round up the anti-revolutionaries of S&P and send them to the gulag before that.
Justice is swift when it comes to reactionary enemies who threaten to change the change.
It is already in process!
In modern usage, sophism, sophist and sophistry are derogatory terms. A sophism is taken as a specious argument used for deception. It might be crafted to appear logical while actually representing a falsehood, or it might use obscure words and complicated sentence constructions in order to intimidate the opponent into agreement out of fear of feeling foolish. Other techniques include manipulating the opponents prejudices and emotions to overcome their logical facilities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism
The small c communists posing as something else (the Democratic Party, our mass media, our pop culture entertainment and our soft “science” academia) have no intention of producing anything but chaos out of this “stupor committee”…and then launching an all out assault on the Republicans, blaming THEM for the “automatic trigger”.
The “automatic trigger” does two things. It destroys our military and also take a broken, unsustainable and bankrupt entitlement and puts it on a different trajectory.
The voters who will be up in arms at this are 1)seniors and 2) strong supporters of a strong military.
Now, think about this for a moment. Which party is going to suffer the most damage….because their constituency would be enraged at that outcome? Which party dominates the age group that includes the older, patriotic segment?
What did Bill Ayers say about wanting to eliminate 25 million Americans? What precisely was his intent and why did he want to eliminate them.
Now, let’s look at the “selections” of the stupor committee. John Kerry has been lending us his memories, those that are “seared…seared, mind you…” in his mind, about our military since the days he invented reasons to aid and abet the enemy, destroy our reputation, our morale and our determination…for the past several decades.
We used to have a word for persons like this. Xavier Becerra is a racer. Patti Murray is a party frenzy organizer. When the intended chaos ensues…Murray will simply be a tool for Debbie Downer and the propaganda machine (that they quite insidiously have us mindlessly calling “mainstream”)…and the Republicans will get “equal” blame, the voters saying “a pox on both your houses”.
Except for one thing. The small c communists win on all counts. Not a chance they could have shredded our military out in the open like this. Not a chance they could have sped up the attrition elimination of our rock-ribbed Republican “greatest generation” like this. Not a chance they could have devised a mechanism that did all of this AND blamed the Republicans for it.
The small c communists are sophists not merely by nature, but also by definition. They are masters at the “sophisticratic” method. They create a “message” and then send out assault teams to deliver it. Their arguments are made to sound logical, but in fact they are merely intended to deceive.
We make the horrific mistake of thinking that we are accomplishing something by pointing at the hypocrisies or fallacies. And doing so while they snicker and giggle at us using THEIR terms and phrases…thereby helping to implant and cement their ideology into the culture.
But the damage caused by debating the ARGUMENTS themselves, rather the intended sophistry, gives credibility to the phony and ignores the intended damage.
We gain nothing by being “bi-partisan” with them, because their intention is the overthrow of capitalism. They want to destroy the free market system and they will say and do anything to make people believe otherwise. “By any means necessary” is their motto.
We are asleep at the switch. We mindlessly parrot their words, terms and phrases…cementing them into our popular culture and give them a huge advantage. Their “messaging” is so much stronger than ours, it’s like an NFL team playing a middle school team. It’s not the loss that is dangerous, it’s the inevitable massive injuries.
The small c communists are master sophists. Unless and until we realize and acknowledge the full import of that sentence, we will be constantly fighting and losing the wrong battles…in a war that is being waged under our very noses for the soul of this land of ours.
I thought we already HAD a “supercommittee.” We call it Congress, and it had better get back to work fast. This really is a dumb idea. The supercommitte is going to fail and then automatic cuts will set in because nobody in Washington seems to have the guts to make the cuts that should be made, including getting rid or entire agencies that do NOTHING for this country, like the Department of Energy. Now THAT would be a bold idea, getting rid of some agencies that we don’t really need. But no, we are doomed to get massive accross-the-board cuts that will probably do more harm than good, cutting important Federal departments (like defense) while letting other stupid departments (like Education) remain. And then the people in Congress wonder why their poll numbers are so low.
‘We are asleep at the switch’
It’s much worse than that.
The Republican’s are assisting the destroyers in carrying out the agenda of the enemy within.They are helpless to stop it and an ‘American Spring’ is not far off.
I look at this as ‘divine’ payback on America for her MOST evil fakepeace scheme ,the Road Map to another Islamic terrorist state by cutting up tiny Israel.
Well ,sirs and madame’s; God is cutting U.S. up into divided,antagonistic,chaotic,broken pieces for our nefarious meddling.
For many decades we have been restraining Israel and forcing them to make peace,appease,surrender land to the front line Palestinian/Islamic jihad army.
‘what goes around comes around’ and it’s coming like a flood on this now cursed nation.
I’m inclined to agree with Newt Gingrich.
At names such as Patty Murray, Chris Van Hollen, James Clyburn, nothing but highly negative, contentious and overwhelmingly partisan impressions come up.
John Kerry, when he’s not advising the lapdog media to ignore those divisive and insane tea partiers or escaping tax obligations himself or just plain bloviating, seems like a complete waste of time.
Fred Upton promoted the incandescent lightbulb ban which he now says he is working to repeal. (never mind, Fred, Obama has said he won’t sign the repeal) John Kyl (seems a good guy) will be tearing his hair out.
Prediction: this committee won’t even agree on what to have for breakfast, so, “before Thanksgiving”, those silly automatic deficit reductions will kick in. Unless, as was recently said by someone on “the news” highly familiar with Congressional process, Congress once again finds a way to circumvent its own requirements.
Reids choices are insane. You have the village idiot of Washington State, Patty Murray who is defintely mentally challenged. You have the billionaire tax cheat John Kerry who is famous for betraying his country and calling our soldiers war criminals; you have Baucus who has sold his soul to the Obama regime for some so called State advantage and who is incapable of committing an ethical act. O tempora O mores.
They could have done this on the cheap and gotten better results with fortune cookies. Just have 1 cookie per budgeted agency baked with the fortune being the percent that their budget was to be cut, say random numbers from 10 to 20 percent. Have the head of each agency draw a cookie, read the results and either resign, croak or cope with the new budget.
Just fewer people for Soros to bribe to achieve his ends.
The most irritating aspect of Newt Gingrich is that he is smart and speaks blunt truth. The concept of a Super Committee is a blatant acknowledgement that Congress is a failure; they are incapable of setting fiscal policy. This is not new, it just reached the headlines when our national financial solvency was about to collapse, a fact recognized by Standard & Poor’s (and still exists). The solution was political technique No. 47, kick the can down the calendar, and get the heat off.
The Super Committee is not composed of the philosophers of the ages; they are the same old hacks every body knows. Does any sane person really believe that the rest of Congress is going to voluntary surrender their power to these people? This committee will be defanged on page 893, in some bill related to toilet paper in Guam.
Our focus, during the next election, must be to raise the level of competency in the political body that spends our money. Forget super, just try for candidates who do not regularly drool in their soup. Stay focused on jobs, jobs, and finally, jobs.
I’m thinking this will end up just like the ceiling debate. . .nothing worthwhile. Even if they come up with 1.5 T over 10 years, we’re still going to have 8% automatic increases due to baseline budgeting and thus 1.5 T deficits into the future. Cutting our 2020 debt burden from 27 T to 22 T doesn’t solve the problem.
I’m guessing we will reach a point of no compromise in the committee and faced with catastrophic cuts, both houses will vote to suspend the cuts for further deliberations or until the election takes place.
Call me a cynic.
I have zero confidence in these bozos’ ability to accomplish something meaningful…
Who cares, these people will do nothing and the automatic triggers, well, I bet they are not so automatic.
They are given the task to reduce 1.5 trillion in 10 years. Didn’t we just increase our debt ceiling by 2.4 trillion? Will the debt ceiling be at the new amount every year, $14.? trillion / year ? So, what is 1.5 trillion in 10 years?
New money added to a government budget is never taken out of that budget.
At least we can track the lobby bribes down to 12 people.
At post +15 I doubt anyone will read this. While I’m not confident that the super committee… er extra ordinary.. un ordinary? non usual? unusual committee will create crap, I’m not convinced that secrecy is a problem with the following limitations/thoughts.
1. the US Fed Gov’t in 1788 was created in secret.
2. the Declaration in Independence was created by a special committee of the whole and largely by one individual.
So using unusual form for me isn’t a problem, nor operating in secret. However this leads to
3. when the work of the persons was completed, it was fully published for debate by the respective wholes (continental congress for the Declaration and states for the Constitution).
So the unusual committee of 12 does it’s work and then congress as a whole in their respective houses openly debates the results, this is to me reasonable. I suspect though that not only will they create crap, but that the open debate will be less than that.
Personally I my balanced budget ammendment reads roughly like this.
1. All payments to elected Federal officals and thier departments heads for any services rendered (salaries, travel expenses, etc) are to be paid out of revenue and not debt. Additionally they are to be paid after all other on and off budget payments are made.
2. In the event that there is a shortfall and only some are able to be paid, the treasury is to first pay deparment heads before elected officals, and then elected officals in reverse order of seniority with the VP and Pres paid last.
this means that they will only get paid if the budget is balance
Responses to various things put forth here:
Yes, Bachmann did lead the fight against this. She formed the tea Party caucus, which is about 1/3 of the House Republicans. The debt deal would have been even worse without her, because Boehner tried to cave on any number of things, and the Pubs led by the tea Party led by Bachmann sent him back to the table. Putting spine into spineless Congressional Republicans is a major accomplishment. She deserves real credit for this achievement.
Of course the Dems only sent far-Left kooks and hacks to the table. What else do they have, except the very few moderate-conservative Dems like the Nelsons and Landrieu. They are not gonna send those DINO’s to the table. Pubs will send RINO’s, but Dems won’t send DINO’s. If we Conservatives had our way, we wouldn’t send RINO’s either.
Gingrich is dense. He thinks they won’t allow these 12 to have the power and such. He is so wrong. This is exactly what Congress has been doing for a long time. They have been devolving their responsibility for their jobs to committees, other institutions, and to other branches of government.
They much prefer that the Judicial or Exec branch make the tough calls and take the heat rather than themselves. If it works out, and there is some credit to be taken, Congress will then swoop in and grab some credit.
They do not want to do the jobs they were elected to do. They just want to be re-elected permanently. Take no stances. Give challengers nothing to use against you. For most, this is the best job they could possibly get ever. Great pay and benes. Fawning people. “Ooo, a Congressman!” (Not, “Eewww, a Congressman!”)
This is not Gingrich’s Congress of the mid-90′s. But then, Gingrich resigned his office in disgrace. He quit. Palin is not the quitter. Gingrich is. I find him running for President offensive. He has to know he has no chance at all. He is doing it to keep his speaking fees high and to promote his book sales. He is trying to stay relevant. This usurpation of the political process for self-serving, mercenary reasons is venal and disgusting. It is why his staff all quit.
I do not want to hear criticism of Congress from the guy who quit as Speaker of the House. Quitter.
In the 8-17-11 Wall Street Journal, Murray, Baucus, and Kerry wrote an editorial about their intents. If one filters around the politico-speak and measures the obtuseness of indirect lies, then the triggers are sure to be kicked in because obstructionism theater starts after the great vacation. The market knows this while the European model fails.
Louis Farrakhan Feeds Flash Mobs
Is it racist to report the news truthfully and honestly?
President Barack Hussein Obama’s mainstream media doesn’t think so, as demonstrated in various articles on this weblog and as attested to by a rare and honorable African-American, Professor Walter E. Williams. Williams frankly acknowledges that the MSM censors and expurgates news by downplaying racial agitation and omitting the racial identities of criminals for a variety of reasons, most of which relate to political correctness dictating what Americans are entitled to know.
Nevertheless, the racial beat goes on.
Good Obamabuddy Reverend Louis Farrakhan, aka Calypso Louie, aka Louis Eugene Wolcott, aka the Prince of Rage, aka grand poohbah of the black racist-separatist Nation of Islam, by all indications is still a good buddy despite having asked the president of the United States, “Who the hell do you think you are?” for ostensibly opposing Libya’s Daffy Qaddafi.
Louie has again crawled out from under one of his palace rocks to stir his anti-American pot.
This time, Obama’s bud is beating the drum for the Fort Hood mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan who, like Farrakhan and his tribe, is really a good Muslim despite having slaughtered 13 people and wounding 30 others as he screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” Farrakhan defends the major since Hasan was only attacking American soldiers who are all raping and murderering Muslim women, and men, in the Mideast.
Never fazed by truth, Calypso Louie ignores the facts that 7 of Hasan’s victims were civilians and that the vast majority of our troops would never go near hygienically-challenged Iraqis and Afghanis unless they had to shoot them in the line of duty.
See Farrakhan’s spittle-ridden, hateful diatribe delivered to hooting and howling supporters here: http://bit.ly/nRUXaD.
Were Farrakhan and the president’s former pastor of 20 years, another reverend–for some reason they all seem to be reverends–Jeremiah Wright, the only black seditionists infesting our land, we could readily deal with and defeat them and their nefarious plots and tolerated conspiracies. However, they have a number of accomplices, some in high positions in our municipalities and even in our police departments.
All are as intent on subverting American justice, our laws, and our sense of equitable treatment of all citizens regardless of race and religion as Farrakhan, Wright, and Major Hasan.
In ”More Riotous Times in Obamaland,” http://bit.ly/p9gIJM, and other articles, I detailed some of the chaos erupting in our nation, everywhere from Alabama, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Now further upheavals have occurred.
All the incidents have three factors in common: The miscreants . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5236)
I find most things Newt does offensive and I am very tired of hearing his great intelligence extolled. As a teacher of “gifted” students for many years, I learned that IQs are just a number and may not connote ability in anything other than taking tests. Many find that a glib tongue will get them everything.
After all the brouhaha about budget cuts and THE committee, I think I would elect ro just cut all espenditures by some percent….across the board. Some programs SHOULD be totally eliminated but the dem. members of that committee would never agree. All the freebees and additionsm made by members of congress should be eliminated but all members of the committee would never agree to that. I didn’t hear any members of congress volunteering to not get paid when there was a possibility that certain groups would not be paid in August. So Joe in the wilds of Afghanistan does not get paid while Murray in the wilds of the District of Columbia does. I suppose that would have applied to Obama and Biden also plus the multiple hangers on. One elimination should be the automatic pay raise congress gets every year. At the very least, they should have to vote themselves a raise.
Johann, how dare you criticize my Senator, Max Baucus? He is a statesman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5Y9X5ggxzA Or not.