Debt committee disappointment
By Brian Schoeneman | Monday, November 21st, 2011 | Catch-All, Policy, PoliticsI’m disappointed.
I know I shouldn’t be. I know that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction was never given much credibility in Washington. Almost no one inside the Beltway believed that they would actually succeed. I know I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up that reason and common sense would prevail over election year politics. I should have known better.
They’re stuck between multiple rocks and hard places, the conventional wisdom says. On the left, they’ve got labor and the progressives, who will howl if the deal doesn’t include “revenue,” today’s buzzword for tax increases. On the right, they’ve got the Tea Party and the anti-tax crowd who will wail if the deal includes any tax increases or other revenue measures and doesn’t cut enough. From above, the pressure from the defense industry, veterans and the military who need a deal – any deal – to save them from sequestration, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has labeled “crippling” to the DOD. And from below you have the dozens of retiree groups who want to see absolutely no changes to social security, medicare and medicaid.
About the only thing of value that kind of pressure creates is diamonds. In politics, it creates stalemate. Normally stalemate is okay. But not here.
And that’s one of the reasons why I always figured they’d get a deal done. The rules were always pretty loose to begin with. The deadline was November 23 – but the deadline doesn’t really mean anything. All the deadline requires is a deal that will be sent to the full House and Senate for an up or down vote in December. The deal doesn’t have to be a good one, or even one that anyone can deal with. As long as it’s voted on, the debt ceiling increases are triggered. And even if it stinks, there’s still a year to fix it before any of the really bad stuff happens in January of 2013. Granted, it may not stop the markets from tanking and our credit rating from being lowered again, but the really bad stuff was delayed.
We’re not talking about a huge amount of money here either. The cuts simply need to be $1.2 trillion over 10 years – or $120 billion a year. When our debt sits at $15 trillion and rising, and the budget deficit itself is now in the trillions, those kinds of cuts shouldn’t be impossible. Same with revenue. There are ways to raise revenue that don’t have to involve tax increases, even on the richest 1%.
I noticed the subtle shift in the talking points in the middle of last week. I was eating lunch with a member of Congress last week and they told me that the Speaker had started referring to the debt committee and Republican goals in the past tense – he’d always referred to it in the future tense before. And a Democratic colleague told me a similar story, too. In the span of a few days, all hope seemed to vanish.
I, along with many others, had hopes that something would get done. That the across the board cuts that automatic sequestration would cause would be scary enough to the 11 men and 1 woman on the supercommittee that they would work to get a deal done. That somehow, politics in this country hadn’t become as dysfunctional as everyone seems to think it has become.
Part of me has that hope still – the hope that at the last minute, something gets done. This is the same part of me that still had hope last night that Graham Gano might actually make a 52 yard field goal, the same hope that next season the Orioles might get out of the cellar, the same hope that I have that somebody can beat Barack Obama next year. But my reason keeps getting in the way.
The Committee didn’t have to fail. But as I sit here, Monday morning, knowing that a deal needs to be finalized today and time is running out, I’m disappointed.
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About the author
A veteran political professional, long-time Republican party activist and attorney Brian W. Schoeneman has been offering his opinions at Bearing Drift since 2010. He serves on the Board of Virginia Line Media, LLC, which operates Bearing Drift and spends his days representing the U.S. Merchant Marine in Washington, D.C. He hails from Fairfax County, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and son.
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12 Responses to "Debt committee disappointment"
[...] Schoeneman offers his take on this mess here. Tags: federal debt Grover Norquist interest payments Mark Warner Pat Toomey [...]
The super committee was doomed before the start.. The Tea Party Budget made more sense but Schumer went off half cocked and they had to move.. http://www.freedomworks.org/the-tea-party-budget
Here is the full PDF of the budget http://blogs.freedomworks.org/files/TeaPartyBudget.pdf
Brian,
See why I would vote for you as the individual instead of based upon party you ran under?
We need more people like you in government. We do not need to elect more extremists who are unwilling to compromise.
“Despairing over debt at home and abroad, investors unloaded stocks Monday and sent the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 300 points. Stock markets also fell sharply across Europe. The sell-off came as a special 12-member panel of Congress appeared ready to declare failure in its attempt to agree on how to bring the federal budget deficit down by $1.2 trillion over 10 years.”
Of course, similar haedlines are appearing all over this nation as stalemate in our political system has now become the major impediment to recovery. In fact, there does not really appear to be any other major impediment, just obstructionism.
Now some may say the blame belongs to both sides, and some does, but this failure will be painted in large red letters on the backs of republicans who deserve 90% of the blame. Having made it remarkably clear that they would do anything to prevent the re-election of the President, they have done exactly that.
First, they caused a remarkable self imposed wound on all us, the taxpayers, by their actions during the debt renewal debate. Even when Boehner and the President had the deal that would have prevented all this angst, Cantor and the republican study commmittee made sure no grand deal was done. As I recall, the market went down 400 points that time.
Now, despite the democrats putting major cuts to Medicare and Social Security on the table, the republicans simply would not agree to increased revenue, so again, the market goes down at a time when the economy does seem to be gaining traction.
This is a republican war over ideology which has never worked, and will never work, but with changes to campaign finance regulations, can continue to be sold to the american people by corporate interests working on behalf of their shareholders. When, oh when, will republicans ever start considering our interests?
I guess that when it comes to economics, the Democrats have all that social baggage to bear.
It seems that some within the Republican Party are willing to sign on with those that finance them in an unholy deal with the devil.
What am I talking about? I am talking about Evangelical Christians. They are one issue, and that is abortion. As long as the Devil agrees to oppose abortion, the Devil can have his way.
I’d be curious to know where the blame actually lies. I’ve read that the right seems unwilling to raise taxes or let the Bush tax cuts expire and hasn’t offered to make any concessions. While the left has put social programs on the table but won’t agree unless the right offers something.
As an additional penalty for not reaching a deal, all documents related to the super-committee should be made public. If they can’t find common ground, I’d sure as hell like to know where the blame actually lies.
It’ll be interesting to see how the $1.2 trillion in cuts will play out.
@ Turbo,
You might agree with the Tea Party Budget but the document itself reads like a high school project and its logo is that of a little league baseball team. Is there any need to go into the details of the plan? There might be a few good ideas scattered throughout the document but the overall plan is absolutely terrible.
Here’s the secret – the Bush tax cuts are going to expire. Period. They run out next December and there is no way that President Obama let’s them be extended, not even for a middle class tax cut. So that right there gets the Democrats the revenue they wanted.
There’s really nothing secret that hasn’t been made transparent. These guys were simply not meeting and not working things out. The last public meeting was over a month ago, and the last private meeting was three weeks ago. Granted, some of this stuff happens in small one or two person meetings, but you can’t resolve issues if no one is talking.
Bottom line for me is that this failure is a failure of cooperation, an unwillingness for either side to capitulate for fear of retribution from their bases. It’s unfortunate that no one on either side was willing to take one for the team (meaning the country) and break ranks.
Now we’ll get to see two months of finger pointing before Congress tries to untangle the mess they’re in. In the mean time, the stock market tanks, our credit rating gets another beating, and a lot of folks head into Thanksgiving with a hefty helping of uncertainty along with their turkey.
Brian, always enjoy your postings. We’re buried in a garbage pile of ‘unintended consequences’ yet hell-bent on repeating mistakes of the past. We screwed w/ the founder’s framework in the early 1900s; 100 years later the lack of accountability, DIRECT outcome of 17th Amendment, gave us massive government growth, entitlements, pork, irresponsible spending, and full scale sell off to special interest groups. We did this to ourselves – self inflicted wound that will fester until, just like the town drunk, we hit the bottom ~ a complete financial and/or social meltdown, whichever comes first.
The absolutely only way path to turnaround is for Americans to a) get smarter, b) take full and personal responsibility and step up, c) stop voting ‘values’, d) stop supporting legislators that vote party first, e) massive non-partisan support for those few left on the Hill that do stick their neck out (like our own Senator Warner), and f) repeal the 17th. What odds would you give to that happening?
Britt, the view (blame republican ideology) is myopic, at best.
Frankly, the Sequester was as good a deal as we were going to get. And it doesn’t really cut anything except planned future increases–not increases, just a slice of them. It’s monopoly money and budget trickery anyway. What’s all the fuss about?
David Brooks on Charlie Rose last night (on just this topic). Well worth watching ~ unless only interested in fuel for blame game. If Brook’s analysis is right (and I personally think he’s dead on target), we’ve just come through the best of the worst of times.
http://www.charlierose.com/
Watch the deck chairs rearrange themselves. It never ceases to amaze me how R’s & D’s get together and blow smoke and blame each other.. This IS congressional politics as usual and case in point for the definition of insanity. 9% approval.. that includes you people.
We blew through 15B and Congress has not slowed down spending. Even if we paid back all +15T we owe, we remain on a path to financial armageddon because of the rate of debt we have obligated ourselves to, no, I mean Congress has brilliantly obligated us to automatic increases in mandatory spending. The federal govt registered an annual budget surplus only 12 times since great depression began.
The people with the answers are few in numbers so until our fiscal situation creates a crisis that ruins Congress members social life I do not expect our situation to improve.
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