Deficit-reduction fever rages, but plans for a Christmas-tree tax are axed.
Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
11/11/2011
Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.
I had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform – such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.
But I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is, instead, going to increase it. As The Hill reported:
“Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.”
Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:
“The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.”
Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”?…
… Meanwhile, as these ruthless austerity measures start to bite, the Government of the United States continues to spend one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour, every day, every week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan…
The entire article is at OCRegister.com
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