Obama, The Congressional Super Committee, and Their Deficit Of Courage

I cannot lay claim to part of today's title, "Deficit of Courage." It was the title of the lead story to the December 2, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, a story that outlined the failure of the Congressional "Super Committee" to come up with a rational way to downsize outrageous Federal government spending by a mere $1 TRILLION or so.

As you may recall, the Super Committee arose out of the pathetic political discussions from this summer during the debt ceiling crisis. The agreement was to have this Super Committee come up with a package of government spending reductions and have the entire Congress vote yes or no on the entire package. If the Super Committee failed to reach a consensus, it was agreed at that time to arbitrarily reduce government spending across the board by $1.2 TRILLION.

As we predicted at the time, as did most rational people, this concept of a Super Committee was highly unlikely to succeed. Given how dysfunctional our political class in Washington has become, forever looking out only for their own personal enrichment and perpetual reelection campaign, it was unlikely any member of the Super Committee would courageously stick their neck out and suggest doing the right thing for the country, especially with a major election year coming up. As expected, courage was in short supply with the Super Committee. President Obama also came up short big time in the courage department, taking a hands off, leaderless approach, not leading and pushing for tough budget cuts, hiding in the shadows and allowing the Super Committee to take the political hit when it failed.

And their task was relatively simple if they only had a little courage since a lot of the work in identifying wasteful government spending, criminal fraud in government programs, and redundant government programs has already been done.  Organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Concord Coalition, the Bipartisan Policy Center, Obama's own deficit reduction commission, the Congressional Budget Office, and others have already identified hundreds of ways to reduce unnecessary government spending. These efforts were detailed, thoughtful, and mostly compassionate insights on how to cut excessive government spending the least painful ways possible.

In previous posts, we had summarized the findings of these fine organizations and had added our own thoughts, easily finding a variety ways to cut over $6 TRILLION from the national debt. Such a debt reduction would allow us to reduce our taxes, reduce our government debt interest payments on our national debt, and promote growth in our economy and reduce unemployment. The failure of the Super Committee, Obama, and the political class as a whole will result in none of these positive effects.

Consider our previously documented savings just from cleaning up fraud and criminal activity in existing government programs:

1. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in the Medicare program = $60 - $90 billion (more on this aspect of fraud later this week where we will see how easy it is to steal from this government program.)
2. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in the Medicaid program = $30 - $40 billion
3. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in the Social Security program = $70 billion
4. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in just one of the Federal government unemployment benefits program = $19 billion
5. Estimate annual loss of IRS tax collection revenue due to criminal tax evasion = $197 billion
6. Total annual savings if the fraud and criminal activity was cleaned up in just these five programs = $376 - $416 billion
7. Ten year savings = About $3.8 - $4.2 TRILLION

Thus, as you can see it is not hard to find TRILLIONS of dollars worth of  Federal government savings. We can get into the TRILLIONS before we even touch outsized military spending, eliminating unneeded government departments and functions, etc.

Several recent articles from Business Week came up with several other areas of worthwhile spending cuts that the magazine suggested the Super Committee look into:

• Implement a better indicator of inflation, the so-called "chained consumer price index" which would result in government Social Security savings of $232 billion over 10 years.
• Gradually increase the age of when Medicare benefits begin to age 67, from age 65, which would save $125 billion over ten years.
• Reduce farm subsides, at a time when American farmers are one of the few domestic industries enjoying robust economic times, which would save $28 billion without much pain to the industry.
• Increase the amount that Federal workers pay into their pension system, which would save $47 billion.
• The Business Week article that included the above spending cuts totals out to about $700 billion over ten years, savings that would be increment to the $4 TRILLION or so we identified above.
• Another, subsequent Business Week article found $500 billion in savings by terminating just two unneeded military weapon programs: the next generation fighter plane, the F-35 Lightning, since our current jet fighter planes are still far superior to anything else in the world ($385 billion in savings) and also the unneeded construction of eleven new Ford -class aircraft carriers ($120 billion in savings).

Thus, just these two Business Week articles found $1.2 TRILLION in unneeded government expenses.

None of the reductions in government spending from these areas reduced Social Security or Medicare benefits, made elderly people homeless, reduced aid to needy families and kids, or increased taxes on any American. And the Super Committee could not even come up with a plan to address these disgraces of wasted resources.

It is pathetic that the Super Committee and Obama could not even find a single $1 to reduce from our outlandish Federal government budget.  But for something truly pathetic, let's go from the macro savings above to how poorly the political class spends our money at the micro level and why there is so much waste to cut from our government's spending.

An Associated Press article recently reported on a Seattle area married couple that have been having a grand time defrauding the Federal government, and the American taxpayer, over the past few years. The article reported that:

• The married couple lived in a 2,300 square foot, $1.2 million house in the Seattle area.
• The article cites the probability that the couple also owned an expensive Jaguar automobile since investigators found it constantly parked in their driveway.
• Over the past eight years the couple had taken vacation trips to Moscow, Paris, Israel, Turkey, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
• During this same time period, the couple had collected over $100,000 in Federal welfare payments.
• Finally, after eight years, the local U.S. Attorney General's office is going after the couple in an attempt to recover $135,000 in Federal housing assistance and additional fines and penalties (why the Attorney General is not looking to lay some jail time on these people is a mystery and quite disturbing).
• Apparently, the wife applied for the government assistance by claiming that she was a single mother with two kids and assets worth less than $5,000 even though she was still married, according to the information and proof cited in the article and was living in the $1.2 million home with her successful, chiropractic practicing husband.

Micro level or macro level, is there any doubt how wasteful and incompetent our political class in Washington is? The single Attorney General in Washington state will apparently reduce our government's national debt with this single criminal case than twelve members of Congress and their staffs could do in three months of the Super Committee.

Why should any American, rich or poor, pay any more taxes to these people in D.C. when it is lost to fraud, criminal activity and waste? Why does no one in Washington, from the White House to the Senate to the House Of Representatives have any backbone at all and stand up and say, "Enough?" Why is it all we ever get is spineless political sound bites from these people as the Federal national debt soars above $15 TRILLION and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth are wasted every year?

All good questions all with one good answer: term limits. Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would impose term limits on all Federal politicians in order to finally get people into office who are interested in truly making a bold, positive and courageous difference and who are likely to have more courage in making these right decisions since they would not have to worry about their reelection chances, those chances would not longer exist with term limits.

As Grumpy,  a professional  Brazilian clown once said, and used as his successful political campaign slogan for a Brazilian Congressional seat, "how much worse could it get?" Same thing here, how much worse and less courageous could it get if we had term limits on our political class, which is currently deficit of any inkling of courage?


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.



Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/