By John Sykes
This morning “The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page scolds Tea Party members of Congress for not supporting the Boehner plan and tells them to grow up and get with the program. One can only imagine how this advice will be taken.”
Let me suggest “how this advice will be taken”!
Immediately what comes to mind is that the $1.2 Trillion in debt reduction promised has, in this morning’s light, already been proven to be a sham after the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the “bill falls $150 billion short … in deficit reduction over 10 years that Boehner originally pledged.”
The Washington Examiner headlines the “CBO: Boehner plan cuts deficit by $1 bln in 2012, $851 bln over 10 years”. Then it reveals the games and shams that are being played on us! The cuts aren’t guaranteed:
The news that the deficit savings are backloaded to occur in years that the current Congress has no control over is likely to increase doubts among House conservatives who were already skeptical about the plan.
Do the terms in the following quote sound like real cuts to you? Looks to me like almost all of it is playing on a rising base line and cutting projected increases
In total, the plan would reduce discretionary spending by $695 billion compared to current projections for 2012 through 2021, cut mandatory spending by $20 billion, and save $135 billion in interest payments.
In 2012, the one fiscal year that the current Congress has full control over, discretionary spending is only supposed to go down by $5 billion. Those savings are projected to increase over time reach $112 billion in 2021. But the problem with relying so heavily on discretionary spending cuts rather than structural reforms to mandatory programs is that it's hard to bind future Congresses's into meeting the caps.
So not only do we get scammed by rising baselines, they use multiple ones!
This report is likely to create much confusion and debate, because the office compares Boehner's proposal to multiple baselines. CBO issued one baseline in January, revised it in March, and made further revisions when Congress struck a deal to avert a government shutdown, which lowered the 2011 number. Also, the caps exclude spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Zerohedge.com addresses the situation similarly:
Granted, Boehner's plan is an abysmal joke, with $4 billion in discretionary spending cuts in 2012 growing mysteriously to $111 billion by 2021, and $0 billion in debt service reduction for 2012 and 2013 (growing to $37 billion in 2021), for a combined cumulative deficit impact of $850 billion, which on a NPV basis is more like $50 billion …
Do I need to mention the immediately-past debt ceiling scam that started out at $100 billion, got to $38 billion in the final say, and turned out to in fact cut some $100s of millions?
Need I bring up the fact that every President since but including Reagan have raised debt ceilings a total of some 60-70 times?
Need I point out that. in that same time period, the GOP has been in control of our future the majority of the time?
This tea partier says all of Congress needs to quit trying to game us and give us real numbers, not pie-in-the-sky, future debt reductions tied to committee decisions and rising baselines that mean nothing! And we need structural change like a constitutional amendment now!
Or our politicians, almost all of them, need to come home.
Remember in November of 2012 but keep yowling now!
No comments:
Post a Comment