The supercommittee turned out to be a dud. Charged with devising a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion by Thanksgiving, the 12 members came up with — zero.
Democrats said the problem was that the Republicans refused to allow any tax increases on the top 1 percent. Republicans said the Democrats wouldn’t even talk about cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, so no deal.
The consequence of failure is supposed to be that automatic cuts will be put into place that will include trimming the defense budget by 10 percent.
That stipulation was supposed to scare Republicans into accepting tax increases. But it didn’t.
The 12 failed to act because it wasn’t in their political interests to do so.
Republicans didn’t want even a nickel in new revenue because they didn’t want to go into next year’s election labeled as tax hikers when they all had signed anti-tax pledges to a Washington lobbyist. They weren’t worried that the automatic cuts would actually occur, in any case. Anything one Congress can do, the following Congress can undo. As a matter of fact, legislation to protect the Pentagon against painful cuts is already being written.
The penalty for not reaching a workable deficit reduction plan was a paper tiger: no penalty at all — but the penalty for agreeing to tax the rich by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as they are set to do at the end of next year was a clear and present danger to their political careers, or so they persuaded themselves.
Democrats, on the other hand, didn’t feel any danger. They would gain politically if they won an agreement from the Republicans to include a significant increase in federal revenue in the mix. If they could not, however, they gained a powerful campaign weapon. They could go to the voters next year as the champions of the middle class, the elderly and the poor. Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare are exempt from the across-the-board cuts that are due to take place beginning in 2013.
The public has said over and over again that raising taxes on those who earn $1 million a year or more is a peachy-keen way to trim the deficit. Why not, the public is the 99 percent.
The Democrats, in short, had little to lose if the supercommittee flunked its assignment.
BUT BOTH PARTIES lost when the 12 walked away from the table saying, “sorry, but responsible government just isn’t our thing.” Congress had already lost the respect of the American people. Only 9 percent think it is performing well, an historic low. Surely today’s events will cut that number still further.
More important, the nation lost. The hope the deficit reduction committee offered was that a start could be made on righting the country’s fiscal ship. Any plan that has a ghost of a chance of working would include both budget cuts and revenue increases. The president’s bipartisan deficit reduction commission reached that conclusion last year — and spelled out the details. Their plan was supported by enough liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans to become law. But no effort was made to put it into action then and this year’s so-called supercommittee apparently ignored its tough wisdom.
They decided, instead, to default; to devote the next year to the 2012 campaign rather than to the nation’s welfare.
OUR REPUBLIC will probably make it through 2012. We did, after all, survive the Civil War and the Great Depression. But let it be said now that the Congress that came into being in 2010 has done everything it could to make the nation’s problems worse and to slow the nation’s progress economically, ethically and culturally, across the board.
The 9 percent who think it’s doing OK must have misunderstood the question.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
