…in New Debt Limit Deal via “Supercommittee”; Contradicts Boehner Claim No Tax Increases in the Deal
Brian
Freedom’s Lighthouse
8/1/2011
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is giving his daily briefing right now, and he has spent most of it talking about the need for tax increases in the days ahead. Carney has used multiple euphemisms for “tax increases” – like “balanced approach,” “revenue increases,” “shared sacrifice,” etc. Carney claims the Debt Limit Agreement allows for tax increases through the “supercommittee” charged in the deal with coming up with additional cuts by Thanksgiving. He specifically said that committee can find ways to increase “revenue,” and bring a “balanced approach.”
That runs directly counter to House Speaker John Boehner and others who have said there are no tax increases in the deal that the Senate and then the House are likely to take up today…
The article, with video, continues at Freedom’s Lighthouse.
GOP Sen. Ron Johnson on debt deal: ‘Disgusting’
…On Sunday night’s special edition of “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” on the Fox News Channel, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson expressed his frustration over the deal by calling it “disgusting.”
“Even right now we are supposedly talking about a deal that will be $2.4-trillion worth,” Johnson said. “Think about what that is: $2.4-million-million worth. You just have a couple people negotiating this. I mean, it is ridiculous. We’re talking about the federal government’s budget here.”
One of the problems, he said, was that the deal didn’t meet the rating agencies’ requirements for the federal government to hold on to its pristine debt rating.
“Here’s the first problem — the rating agencies, everybody is keying in on that,” Johnson said. “You know, they say we need $4 trillion, you know, to afford it, to avoid a downgrade in our debt. This is only going to be about $2.4 trillion.”
The freshman Wisconsin Republican, who was an accountant before coming to Washington, said there was some fuzzy math in the first few years of the deal…
The “Budget Control Act of 2011″ (BCA) contains provisions for a joint committee of Congress, whose supposed job it is to make recommendations to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion. But the legislation does not require the joint committee to do that job. It is merely a “goal” of the joint committee to recommend at least $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, but even if the committee fails to do so, the Congress will give expedited consideration anyway to whatever is in the joint committee bill. The Congressional Budget Office letter of August 1, 2011 scoring the legislation noted that the joint committee is merely “charged with the goal of reducing the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion between 2012 and 2021.”
We know that proposing $1.5 trillion is the intended job of the joint committee, because a slide from Speaker Boehner’s office (marked “Updated: July 31, 10:35 pm EST”) says the agreed-on framework “creates a 12-member Joint Committee required to report legislation by November 23, 2011 that would produce a proposal to reduce the deficit by at least $1.5T over 10 years.”
But sometime between the Speaker’s slide at 10:35 p.m. and the House Legislative Counsel’s draft of the “Budget Control Act of 2011″ (marked “August 1, 2011 (12:04 p.m.)” and posted on the House Rules Committee Website) somebody made the decision that the joint committee does not actually need to propose $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. Because the actual legislation does not require the joint committee bill to recommend $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction for the bill to get expedited consideration in Congress…
Change: DC’s Grand Bargain Cuts Only 17 Hours Of Gov Spending Next Year
…We should also consider the ramifications of Congress’s need for “Triggers” that activate across the board cuts if they fail to meet their targets. As I said last night on Twitter, that amounts to a Heroin addict spiking his drugs with arsenic in an effort to make himself stop using. Washington remains addicted to spending and a politics of old we must leave behind.
Most of our current elected DC political class is steeped in an old politics as America enters a new and extremely challenging era with a critical demand for new thinking. Unfortunately, that includes leadership on both sides of the aisle.
Mark Levin: Boehner, McConnell Are In Wrong Place In History
Change can mean many things, some is evolutionary, some comes from revolution. Speaking only for myself, this is not some knee-jerk response to one bad deal I may not appreciate. It’s not exactly clear to me how we move forward from here…
Debt Deal: Turning the Ship of State in the Right Direction, but. . .
Congress Pushing McConnell ‘Obama-as-Dictator’ Plan Behind the Scenes?
…Despite what some of the now-exposed-as-faux Conservative talk-showers, columnists and book peddlers would have us believe, the McConnell plan was not and is not “brilliant!” Instead, it is disastrous to all of We-the-People…
…Yes… We-the-People have been sold out to the globalists who, along with our own elected leaders under their leader Obama, have almost completely gutted the US Treasury. Our GNP growth is only at 1.3% and we suspect even that figure will be lowered in a month or so. Were you aware that Apple, Inc. is now reported to have more money than the US Treasury?
Obama has done his job in record time. No wonder he’s still smiling! None of the people in either political party who currently plan to run for POTUS in 2012 seem ethical enough or capable enough of helping to save this country…
Conservatives’ best argument for the deal
Throughout the debt-ceiling debate, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking minority leader on the Senate Budget Committee, has railed against the absence of a proper budget process. For over two years, the Senate has not produced a budget. This is not simply a matter of being a stickler for rules. Sessions understood that, without a budget, Senate Democrats could evade responsibility for making tough choices and simply demagogue whatever Republicans proposed.
Sessions warned against letting the budgeting process and the debt-ceiling dispute devolve into a mad rush at the end of a tiresome process. He, alas, gets his “I told you so” moment. In a statement he explains:
“I am glad that this matter appears to be on its way to resolution prior to August 2nd. However, I have warned from the very beginning that by shunning our legislative process and Senate heritage we would find ourselves in the 11th hour forced to vote on a bill with little or no time for meaningful review or public engagement, and without any chance to amend the work. This chain of events was set into motion by the president’s absolute unwillingness to offer any concrete plan to reduce the spending he radically surged over the last two years, combined with the Democrat Senate’s derelict refusal to adopt a budget for 823 days. [emphasis CAJ]
His solution, however, is not to try to sink a deal at this stage…
Protecting Entitlements Is a Strange and Self-Destructive Principle for Liberals [via HotAir.com].
“…how did a particular category of spending, entitlements, come to matter more than who it helps or what it does?…”
Why Obama actually cared about the Aug. 2 deadline
True, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner persistently warned that the nation might default on its obligations if politicians couldn’t strike a deal to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit by Aug. 2 — and the president took Geithner at his word (or, at least, he said he did). But the president had at least one other reason to want a quick wrap on the debt ceiling negotiations:
[H]e also wanted to get back to some other critical business: fundraising for his 2012 campaign. Obama turns 50 on Thursday. The day before, he is scheduled to fly to his hometown of Chicago for a pair of birthday fundraisers at the Aragon Entertainment Center. The events will feature musical performers and cost up to $35,800 per person, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. …
After the Chicago trip, one administration official [said], the president will hit the road several more times before his annual vacation in Martha’s Vineyard at the end of August…
Bolton on proposed defense cuts: A potential dagger at the heart of national security
Three ratings agencies have already downgraded U.S. credit [The Blaze has a list of “Monday morning must-reads” of which this headline is one.]
Glenn Beck: We’ve just been betrayed by Washington:
Glenn Beck wrote an editorial this morning on why the debt limit deal is a bad deal and why it betrays America (via TheBlaze):
Don’t be fooled. We’ve just been betrayed by Washington.
A deal on the debt ceiling is near and Washington still hasn’t gotten serious about the fundamentals. It hasn’t gotten serious about default. It certainly hasn’t gotten serious about the future. When Harry Reid hails a “bipartisan compromise” you know we’re doomed.
Republicans and Democrats have just negotiated away the future of our children behind closed doors. The big compromise on Capitol Hill features elaborate triggers, tranches, Hornswogglers, Snozzwangers, Super Duper Commissions that will make the Snozzberries taste like Snozeberries, and a whole bunch of other convoluted gibberish that will, no doubt, come with loopholes and create entire new bureaucracies. What it doesn’t do is fix the problem.
The fact is Moody’s has already warned us that no one has put a plan on the table that comes close to solving our long-term problem. Moody’s will downgrade us…
