Super Committee Focus on Tax Hikes Robs Taxpayers of Spending Reform

ATR ^ | 2011-11-21 | Mattie Duppler Corrao

[92nina]

The affirmation from the Super Committee today that they will not be producing a debt proposal comes as no surprise after repeated reports that Democrats refused to agree to a deal that did not include massive tax hikes. In September, ATR offered the below suggestions to find $1.5 trillion in savings—simple solutions that would have gone beyond the $1.2 trillion debated by the committee. Democrats instead torpedoed the opportunity to enact such commonsense reforms, arguing tax hikes can fix what it is a fundamental spending problem.

First, the Committee should enact a hard, nominal discretionary spending freeze at the FY2012 levels.
Savings: $971 billion.

Secondly, the following reforms offer multiple ways for the committee to find its way to $1.5 trillion in savings (calculated over ten years, unless otherwise noted):

• Revive federalism – Give states control over their Medicaid programs, remaining federal welfare programs and transportation spending.
  Devolving transportation to the states:
  Savings: $540 billion
  Block-granting Medicaid:
  Savings: $750 billion
• Decrease the regulatory burden – Regulatory budgets have grown by 72.5 percent over the past decade, which is much faster than the reported costs of regulations in the same time period. Simply freezing spending on regulatory agencies’ at its ten-year average would create real savings while stemming aggressive regulatory overreach.
  Savings: $298 billion
• Eliminate costly federal labor mandates – federal labor laws inflate the cost of construction projects with arbitrary wage mandates and uncompetitive union requirements.
  Repealing the Davis-Bacon Act:
  Savings: $108 billion
  Repealing Project Labor Agreements:
  Savings: $24 billion
• Spending Reform
  Stop appropriating for unauthorized programs Power-hungry appropriators annually fund programs and agencies whose authorizations have expired.
  First year savings: $290 billion (2010 CBO estimate, does not include “indefinite” appropriations)...

[92nina]

The Super Committee announced today it would not report a proposal to net $1.2 trillion in savings. We offered $1.5 in September - what was so hard?

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at Digg and at Reddit and in Stumbleupon and Delicious

[Graewoulf]

Nice try Mattie Corrao, but nothing you write mentions a cut in BASELINE spending.

BTW, the only real money spending cuts are what is cut on a 1 year clock. This 10 year clock is just 2X the old Commie 5 year Plan BS.

[M.T. Helmets]

I say forget the Super Committee and create the Super-Duper Committee which would consist of every member of Congress — all 535 of them. They would each have only one job.

That is.....find just $2.2 billion in spending cuts. If they can find $2.2 billion and get it passed, they can keep their job. If not, they're fired.

Once every member of Congress votes in favor of each of the 535 spending cuts, in order to assure that they get to keep their own job, we will have $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.

Simple. (Patting self on back)

[ez]

Lets take this one step further...wasn’t the task of the committee to identify 1.2 trillion in spending cuts? And therefore isn’t changing the focus from spending cuts to tax increases abdicating the purpose of the committee.

Now who gets blamed...

[Cheerio]

ALL BUSH'S FAULT!!

[Graewoulf]

EXCELLENT observation! Way to expose the smokescreen of “revenue.”

[92nina]

You got a point there. And that would presume future Congresses added nothing.

[Graewoulf]

Thanks for this thread. The author of the article was misled to think that what you and I consider a cut was really a cut. What the Debtocrats consider a cut to be is a “reduction in the rate of future spending.”

What you and I consider to be a cut is what the Debtocrats call “a year-to-year reduction in the baseline of spending.”

Hence, unless the baseline spending is reduced, the ol’ National Debt Clock will just keep on a’going, and a’going with bigger and bigger dollars for your grandchildren to pay off.

The Debtocrats know this, and do their best to provide heart-rending smokescreens of poverty, fat-cats, need, corporate jets, poor people, big bonuses, tax-the-rich, no-child-left-behind, revenue, fairness doctrine, etc, etc, etc.

BTW, I forgot to mention their most important smokescreen: THE BIPARTISAN CAVE -IN.