http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/super_committee_fails_to_overcome_republican_dogma_20111121/‘Super Committee’ Fails to Overcome Republican Dogma
Posted on Nov 21, 2011
By Eugene Robinson
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Think about this for a minute. The whole point of the subcommittee exercise was to begin reducing the ballooning national debt, now more than $15 trillion.
Closing such a big gap with spending cuts is possible only in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.
Here in the real world—where tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product are lower than they’ve been since 1950—it’s ridiculous to think of solving the long-term debt problem without substantial new revenue. Yet the position taken by Republicans in Congress is that tax rates can only go down, never up. To uphold this absolutist principle, they have gone so far as to threaten to send the U.S. Treasury into default.snip//
Yes, no deal is almost certainly better than a bad deal. The automatic cuts will be painful, but they don’t touch entitlements—and thus don’t pre-empt the serious discussion we need to have about making sure that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are sustainable.
Instead, the Pentagon bears the brunt of the sword-of-Damocles cuts.
Already, Republicans are beginning to howl that we need to find some way to avoid damaging our national security. The solution is clear: If we want a military that projects American power around the globe, we need to pay for it.
Maybe Republicans will acknowledge that American greatness doesn’t come free. That’s the breakthrough we need.
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