The so-called “Super-Committee,” which will be formed when the debt ceiling vote is passed, is intended to seek ways to cut $2 trillion in government spending over the next 10 years, which is a sore point for Republicans holding fast to Bush tax cuts, resisting any attempts at tax hikes to raise revenue. To “streamline” the process, the Super-Committee will have only12 members (six Republicans and six Democrats), only straight “up and down votes,” and no room for full Congressional debates, amendments, or filibusters. Somehow it sounds unconstitutional, if not a knee-jerk, punitive reaction to the debt ceiling debacle.
It goes on to say, “The compromise measure etched by President Obama and congressional leaders to raise the statutory debt limit will only prolong the gamesmanship over our nation’s deficit, by setting up a bipartisan ‘Super-Committee’ tasked with finding an additional $2 trillion in cuts to government spending over the next 10 years. And Republican leaders are quietly making the case to their restive members that the deal has basically guaranteed that the super-committee can’t hike taxes to raise revenue.”
In short, any deficit reduction offered by the Super-Committee will be measured by the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates how much money lawmakers are actually cutting from the deficit, churning out whatever numbers Republicans and Democrats have been tossing around. Republicans say the CBO must measure the Super-Committee’s proposed cuts against how much money current law requires us to spend. In fact, according to current law, the tax cuts signed into law by President Bush are set to expire at the end of 2011 and will add some $3.6 trillion to the national coffers over the next 10 years.
Republicans chafe at that accounting trick because it makes tax increases “impossible.” According to Power Point slides released by aides to House Speaker John Boehner, the logic goes that if taxes are set to go back to their Clinton-era levels after 2012, saying you’re going to raise taxes from their current levels doesn’t really count as “deficit reduction” since it’s already going to happen.
Personally, I don’t believe that 12 fallible human beings should hold the financial destiny of 320 million Americans in their hands. Aside from that, Republicans contend that the Super-Committee will still have to complete its work by the end of the year without any tax hikes. Then, come December 2012, when Bush tax cuts are again set to expire, Republicans will fight to keep them, arguing Democrats are trying to pass the largest tax increase in U.S. history, as they attempted when the issue was up last for a vote in 2010.
Democrats and liberal bloggers, however, have tossed away this argument. They say there’s nothing in the law that requires the Super-Committee to gauge its work against the “CBO baseline.” The committee could decide by itself to measure its deficit reduction proposals against what financial technicians call “current policy” rather than “current law,” what’s in place right now. Since the Bush tax cuts are presently in effect, the Super-Committee could chose to let them expire and count as deficit reduction.
A White House aide told ABC News that the baseline gimmick “is no obstacle to revenue-raising tax reform. And the president will be making the case that this should be part of a balanced deal coming out of the joint committee.”
Another key point is that hiking income tax rates isn’t the only way to raise revenue via tax reform. A long list of loopholes buried in the nation’s tax code that, if closed, would raise hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years is. The most notable of them is the tax break for corporate jet owners, which Obama has often described as an “egregious abuse” of the tax code. And there are plenty of others, the so-called “carried interest” loophole, allowing hedge fund managers to pay just 15 percent of their income rather than the standard 35 percent in federal taxes. Then there’s the “mortgage interest tax deduction,” allowing homeowners to write off the interest on mortgages, even for second or third homes.
Closing those loopholes would definitely count as deficit reduction, even if you measured against the “current law” yardstick used by the CBO. But the more important point here is that the debate over whether to raise revenue through tax increases is going nowhere. President Obama still believes that we should raise taxes for the nation’s highest earners as part of any deficit reduction agreement, and Tea Party Republicans still remain stiffly opposed to such a measure.
The politics of this issue are also important: Even if Democrats are right and the debt agreement allows them to erase the Bush tax cuts as part of the deficit reduction framework, they might not want to. Polls have consistently shown that Americans support a compromise, combining spending cuts with tax increases for the wealthiest Americans. When the Bush tax cuts came up for a vote last year, Americans were largely in favor of letting them expire for the top two income brackets. Unfortunately, the president buckled when Republicans balked.
But Democrats, it turns out, may still get another shot at rearguing the fight over tax increases—a fight they have now lost at least twice.
Our recent problem in 2011 was that raising the debt ceiling became a political hostage to barter for both sides’ agendas. I would fault the Republicans more than the Democrats as the hostage takers, threatening to cut the entitlements of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, that is, if the Democrats dared to eliminate tax cuts to big corporations who have not been paying their taxes, like General Electric, Valero, Bank of America, or others off-shoring their income to avoid taxes. Also the Democrats wanted the personal tax loopholes of the rich and super-rich closed, which amount to some 3.6 trillion dollars.
The Republicans in their rants overlooked the fact that entitlements like Social Security are paid for by recipients over the course of their working lives. It used to be 6.2 percent of every paycheck, matched by 6.2 percent from employers. Unfortunately, the president at the beginning of the tax year provided for a 2 percent “tax holiday” for working people, shifting that burden to government. Let’s see what happens when the holiday is over and the president may wake up as an unemployed politician in a jobless economy with closer to 16–20 percent unemployment.
Social Security’s benefits are taxed by federal withholding. It’s now based on how much total money you make above $14,160 when you receive Social Security. One dollar was deducted for each $2 you earned over that amount in 2010. If you reached full retirement age during 2010, the earnings limit was $37,680. You must deduct $1 for each $3 earned over $37,680. Additionally, $98.50 is taken out if you elect Part B of Medicare.
Medicare advises that you should have Part D insurance coverage to supplement the “donut hole” in yearly drug coverage or to reduce co-pays for individual drugs. Unfortunately, Medicare is not allowed to bargain with Big Pharma, as does Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. The power to bargain could save Medicare some $2 trillion dollars
This writer’s Part D insurance is provided by Humana and costs $45.50 a month for any gaps in Medicare coverage and co-pays for drugs. You can purchase an HMO, PPO, or Medigap Program from a private health care provider to supplement the general Medicare coverage. I have Medigap Plan F, which costs $248 a month from United Health Care. So the for-profit insurance companies still have their hands in the pie in a big way.
Unfortunately, Social Security’s chief losses have come from the theft of US presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, who shamelessly pilfered the Social Security Trust fund. In Johnson’s case to pay for his Guns & Butter; in Bush’s case for his own pet projects: the aforementioned trillions for tax cuts for the rich, and for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which currently cost the U.S. nearly $1.3 trillion.
This is not to mention the hundreds of billions spent in Pakistan, Libya, $3 billion for Israeli defense annually (for at least 50 years), and so on. The human cost in Iraq was 1,455,590 civilians and military folk and nearly 8,000 U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan. You can see the devastating role these figures play in draining our economy and blood, not to mention the world’s goodwill towards us.
What’s more, we’ve seen how Obama skirted the Congress for funding to attack Libya created another ongoing war. Libya is no longer the “week-long” air-space ban. NATO members now ceaselessly bomb Libya. Illegal funds are being pumped into the rebel coffers by the CIA for weapons as well as mercenaries’ boots on the ground. Libya is now a part of the budget deficit as well.
Bottom line, the Super Committee seems as unconstitutional as the debt ceiling debate was. It invites corruption. If previously the entire Congress could be bought with campaign contributions, lobbyists imagine the way just 12 lucky Democrats and Republicans will be adorned with offers “they can’t refuse.” As the saying goes, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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Does America need a ‘Super Congress’?
Posted on August 5, 2011 by Jerry Mazza
The so-called “Super-Committee,” which will be formed when the debt ceiling vote is passed, is intended to seek ways to cut $2 trillion in government spending over the next 10 years, which is a sore point for Republicans holding fast to Bush tax cuts, resisting any attempts at tax hikes to raise revenue. To “streamline” the process, the Super-Committee will have only12 members (six Republicans and six Democrats), only straight “up and down votes,” and no room for full Congressional debates, amendments, or filibusters. Somehow it sounds unconstitutional, if not a knee-jerk, punitive reaction to the debt ceiling debacle.
Yet PBS’s Need To Know reports , “That the debt-ceiling deal has, for the moment, provided Washington with a brief period of respite. But if you think you’ve heard the last of “discretionary spending” and ‘entitlement reform,’ think again.”
It goes on to say, “The compromise measure etched by President Obama and congressional leaders to raise the statutory debt limit will only prolong the gamesmanship over our nation’s deficit, by setting up a bipartisan ‘Super-Committee’ tasked with finding an additional $2 trillion in cuts to government spending over the next 10 years. And Republican leaders are quietly making the case to their restive members that the deal has basically guaranteed that the super-committee can’t hike taxes to raise revenue.”
In short, any deficit reduction offered by the Super-Committee will be measured by the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates how much money lawmakers are actually cutting from the deficit, churning out whatever numbers Republicans and Democrats have been tossing around. Republicans say the CBO must measure the Super-Committee’s proposed cuts against how much money current law requires us to spend. In fact, according to current law, the tax cuts signed into law by President Bush are set to expire at the end of 2011 and will add some $3.6 trillion to the national coffers over the next 10 years.
Republicans chafe at that accounting trick because it makes tax increases “impossible.” According to Power Point slides released by aides to House Speaker John Boehner, the logic goes that if taxes are set to go back to their Clinton-era levels after 2012, saying you’re going to raise taxes from their current levels doesn’t really count as “deficit reduction” since it’s already going to happen.
Personally, I don’t believe that 12 fallible human beings should hold the financial destiny of 320 million Americans in their hands. Aside from that, Republicans contend that the Super-Committee will still have to complete its work by the end of the year without any tax hikes. Then, come December 2012, when Bush tax cuts are again set to expire, Republicans will fight to keep them, arguing Democrats are trying to pass the largest tax increase in U.S. history, as they attempted when the issue was up last for a vote in 2010.
Democrats and liberal bloggers, however, have tossed away this argument. They say there’s nothing in the law that requires the Super-Committee to gauge its work against the “CBO baseline.” The committee could decide by itself to measure its deficit reduction proposals against what financial technicians call “current policy” rather than “current law,” what’s in place right now. Since the Bush tax cuts are presently in effect, the Super-Committee could chose to let them expire and count as deficit reduction.
A White House aide told ABC News that the baseline gimmick “is no obstacle to revenue-raising tax reform. And the president will be making the case that this should be part of a balanced deal coming out of the joint committee.”
Another key point is that hiking income tax rates isn’t the only way to raise revenue via tax reform. A long list of loopholes buried in the nation’s tax code that, if closed, would raise hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years is. The most notable of them is the tax break for corporate jet owners, which Obama has often described as an “egregious abuse” of the tax code. And there are plenty of others, the so-called “carried interest” loophole, allowing hedge fund managers to pay just 15 percent of their income rather than the standard 35 percent in federal taxes. Then there’s the “mortgage interest tax deduction,” allowing homeowners to write off the interest on mortgages, even for second or third homes.
Closing those loopholes would definitely count as deficit reduction, even if you measured against the “current law” yardstick used by the CBO. But the more important point here is that the debate over whether to raise revenue through tax increases is going nowhere. President Obama still believes that we should raise taxes for the nation’s highest earners as part of any deficit reduction agreement, and Tea Party Republicans still remain stiffly opposed to such a measure.
The politics of this issue are also important: Even if Democrats are right and the debt agreement allows them to erase the Bush tax cuts as part of the deficit reduction framework, they might not want to. Polls have consistently shown that Americans support a compromise, combining spending cuts with tax increases for the wealthiest Americans. When the Bush tax cuts came up for a vote last year, Americans were largely in favor of letting them expire for the top two income brackets. Unfortunately, the president buckled when Republicans balked.
But Democrats, it turns out, may still get another shot at rearguing the fight over tax increases—a fight they have now lost at least twice.
Our recent problem in 2011 was that raising the debt ceiling became a political hostage to barter for both sides’ agendas. I would fault the Republicans more than the Democrats as the hostage takers, threatening to cut the entitlements of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, that is, if the Democrats dared to eliminate tax cuts to big corporations who have not been paying their taxes, like General Electric, Valero, Bank of America, or others off-shoring their income to avoid taxes. Also the Democrats wanted the personal tax loopholes of the rich and super-rich closed, which amount to some 3.6 trillion dollars.
The Republicans in their rants overlooked the fact that entitlements like Social Security are paid for by recipients over the course of their working lives. It used to be 6.2 percent of every paycheck, matched by 6.2 percent from employers. Unfortunately, the president at the beginning of the tax year provided for a 2 percent “tax holiday” for working people, shifting that burden to government. Let’s see what happens when the holiday is over and the president may wake up as an unemployed politician in a jobless economy with closer to 16–20 percent unemployment.
Social Security’s benefits are taxed by federal withholding. It’s now based on how much total money you make above $14,160 when you receive Social Security. One dollar was deducted for each $2 you earned over that amount in 2010. If you reached full retirement age during 2010, the earnings limit was $37,680. You must deduct $1 for each $3 earned over $37,680. Additionally, $98.50 is taken out if you elect Part B of Medicare.
Medicare advises that you should have Part D insurance coverage to supplement the “donut hole” in yearly drug coverage or to reduce co-pays for individual drugs. Unfortunately, Medicare is not allowed to bargain with Big Pharma, as does Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. The power to bargain could save Medicare some $2 trillion dollars
This writer’s Part D insurance is provided by Humana and costs $45.50 a month for any gaps in Medicare coverage and co-pays for drugs. You can purchase an HMO, PPO, or Medigap Program from a private health care provider to supplement the general Medicare coverage. I have Medigap Plan F, which costs $248 a month from United Health Care. So the for-profit insurance companies still have their hands in the pie in a big way.
Unfortunately, Social Security’s chief losses have come from the theft of US presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, who shamelessly pilfered the Social Security Trust fund. In Johnson’s case to pay for his Guns & Butter; in Bush’s case for his own pet projects: the aforementioned trillions for tax cuts for the rich, and for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which currently cost the U.S. nearly $1.3 trillion.
This is not to mention the hundreds of billions spent in Pakistan, Libya, $3 billion for Israeli defense annually (for at least 50 years), and so on. The human cost in Iraq was 1,455,590 civilians and military folk and nearly 8,000 U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan. You can see the devastating role these figures play in draining our economy and blood, not to mention the world’s goodwill towards us.
What’s more, we’ve seen how Obama skirted the Congress for funding to attack Libya created another ongoing war. Libya is no longer the “week-long” air-space ban. NATO members now ceaselessly bomb Libya. Illegal funds are being pumped into the rebel coffers by the CIA for weapons as well as mercenaries’ boots on the ground. Libya is now a part of the budget deficit as well.
Bottom line, the Super Committee seems as unconstitutional as the debt ceiling debate was. It invites corruption. If previously the entire Congress could be bought with campaign contributions, lobbyists imagine the way just 12 lucky Democrats and Republicans will be adorned with offers “they can’t refuse.” As the saying goes, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.