I’ve finally finished my travels from California to the Caribbean to New England, so didn’t get a chance to post this yesterday, but my New York Post column thumped the congenital farce the so-called super committee always was:
The once-bitten, twice-shy Republicans demanded real cuts — not the sham accounting tricks that marked the August deal — while the class-warfare Democrats insisted on higher taxes on “the rich.” Even GOP offers to accept some tax hikes in exchange for fundamental tax reform weren’t enough to sway the Democrats.
That’s because at least one side in this cold civil war never wanted to succeed in the first place. “The worm has turned a little bit,” one Democratic aide was quoted as saying by Politico. “The national conversation now is about income inequality and about jobs, and it’s not really about cutting the size of government anymore or cutting spending.”
So the super committee’s failure was preordained, as the Dems have thrown in their lot with Obama’s demonize-the-productive-class 2012 campaign. They’re trying to change the subject from bloated government, a complex and unfair tax code and out-of-control entitlement spending to a “soak the rich” sham populism exemplified by the recent Occupy Wall Street movement. They’re even willing to risk another downgrade of the country’s credit rating to get the president re-elected.
The GOP, it seems to me, dodged a bullet:
For its part, the GOP ought to be happy that no “grand bargain” was ever reached. Despite Sen. Pat Toomey’s rationale for some “revenue enhancements” (mostly by limiting some deductions in exchange for tax reform), the Tea Party base would have been enraged, expecting the deal (like so many before it) to produce real tax hikes but only illusory spending cuts. Punishment at the polls would have followed.
And if this congressional kluge hasn’t got you crossing the aisles to roll in them, consider the boffo sequel: sequestration! This is the let’s-pretend game to automatically “cut” $1.2 trillion equally from defense and social programs over the next decade, but of course it’s really only about $984 billion, which works out to about $109 billion a year, because — here’s the punch line — it won’t even start happening until 2013, which gives Congress plenty of time to . . . do something or other. To quote the aisle-crosser-in-chief, John McCain, “The Congress is not bound by this. It’s something we passed. We can reverse it.”
Well, that’s comforting. After all, when you’re $15 trillion in the hole, what’s the rush?
But why are we surprised? With few exceptions — Ryan foremost among them — Congress has shown almost no sign that it understands that the jig is up. So both sides will play the blame game and punt meaningful action down to the ballot box.
Will the country be bamboozled by the Democrats’ phony “fairness” argument, or will the normally supine GOP finally grow a spine and level with the American people that we can’t continue to borrow to support an unsustainable federal leviathan?
We have one very dangerous year ahead to find out.
And one very derelict Congress.