SUPER COMMITTEE – FAILURE or SUCCESS?

Thomas Sowell asks the question, was the Super Committee’s report of  no agreement a failure or a success?

Many people are lamenting the failure of the Congressional “Super Committee” to come up with an agreement on ways to reduce the runaway federal deficits. But you cannot judge success or failure without knowing what the goal was.

If you think the goal was to solve the country’s fiscal crisis, then obviously the Super Committee was a complete failure. But, if you think the goal was to improve the chances of the Obama administration being re-elected in 2012, it was a complete success.

Responsibility for the spending that created our enormous and unprecedented deficit would fall squarely on Obama and the Democrats had there been no Super Committee.  But with it, and with the impasse, the Democrats get to pass off half of the blame to Republicans for not coming up with a workable deficit reduction plan.

Sen Jeff Sessions of Alabama had this and more to say,

The budget process began with the submission of the president’s budget plan. Analysis of that plan quickly revealed that the president’s $1.6 trillion tax increase proved totally inadequate to offset the enormous levels of new spending that would occur. Under this plan, over ten years, we would accumulate another $13 trillion in debt, never produce a single deficit less than $748 billion, produce a deficit in the tenth year of $1.2 trillion, and leave entitlement programs like Medicare in grave financial peril.

and

The Senate Democrat majority then made a decision: Rather than introduce a plan of their own, they chose to ignore the law and craft no budget at all.

Had the president made clear he wanted an agreement, a deal would have been achieved. It seems clear he wanted a campaign issue instead. Rather than confronting the great threat of our time—our $15 trillion debt—the commander-in-chief fled the battlefield. That’s not clever; it’s irresponsible. (Courtesy of Power Line blog)

Politics is like an iceberg. What you see is only what’s on the surface. Below the surface is where you find the real mess mass. Scratch that, leave it mess. .