Just who exactly are they trying to fool ?

The old adage rings true: if the lips of a Republican senator or congressperson are moving, they're lying.


Republicans: Super Committee Remarks By Chuck Schumer Are Proof Obama Wants It To Fail

"A recent Quinnipiac University poll found Americans would be more likely to blame the GOP if the super committee fails, by 46 to 36 percent, although the poll also found that voters favor spending cuts over tax hikes." [I think the latter point is ridiculously unsurprising.]

.....

"Last I saw, Sen. Schumer was not on the super committee. I think all three of the Senate Republicans are working really hard to make it work," said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). "I think my side is increasingly concerned that the other side's decided it's strategically to their advantage for it not to work."

Awhile back when the supercommittee was just getting started, I wrote this post:

Is Boehner on the supercommittee or not?

And that quoted an article in the Washington Post, in which Boehner said:

"Tax increases must not be included as part of any bipartisan deal to reduce the country’s debt, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is expected to say Thursday afternoon in remarks before the Economic Club of Washington."

Now, from the horse's ass, errrr, mouth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/us/politics/jobs-speech-by-house-speaker-john-boehner.html

"Tax reform should deal with the whole tax code, both the personal side and the corporate side, and it should result in a code that is simpler and fairer to everyone.

Tax increases, however, are not a viable option for the Joint Committee.

It’s a very simple equation. Tax increases destroy jobs. And the Joint Committee is a jobs committee. Its mission is to reduce the deficit that is threatening job creation in our country."

[Actually, I thought it was a budget committee that was supposed to find at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. But that's just what I read.]

Further down, the ass, I mean Speaker, said:

"When it comes to producing savings to reach its $1.5 trillion deficit reduction target, the Joint Select Committee has only one option: spending cuts and entitlement reform."

So here in September is the Speaker telling the supercommittee what it can and cannot do. And when they finally float their "tax reform" plan, it lowers the highest bracket tax rate and makes the Bush tax cuts -- what got us started on this unsustainable road in the first place -- permanent. That alone adds $3 TRILLION to the debt by 2020; and the savings in their "plan" don't recoup this by half.

Now, let's hear briefly from Mark Warner, who knows a thing or three about balancing budgets that conservative Republicans -- i.e., governor Dummhead, Jim Gilmore -- have unbalanced.

"Unless we are willing to put entitlement reform and tax reform that raises revenues into the mix, we're not going to do the job that we were hired to do."

And he also said:

"We're looking at a ratio of about $3 in cuts for every additional dollar in revenues. And the revenues we're talking about literally are coming from lower rates, where we can lower our rates on individual and on corporate rates back to where they're much more competitive on a worldwide basis. But we're getting rid of a number of the tax expenditures.

I mean, a fact that I'm not sure most Americans realize -- we collect about $1 trillion a year in income taxes, yet we have $1.2 trillion a year in income tax expenditures, deductions, many of them that are popular, charitable deduction, home mortgage deduction. If we would cut back on some of those, we could actually lower rates and still increase revenues."

Final statement: if you restrict the range of potential solutions to a problem, then that is a recipe for failure, because it could leave out the solutions that might actually work. If that type of solution is blocked for reasons of ideological purity, then the fingers of blame are pointing right at the GOP for causing the supercomittee to fail. And then we ALL pay the price of failure.