As recently as February, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was dismissive of the idea of a congressional commission on deficit reduction. In fact, the California Republican made it sound like such an endeavor would be a pointless waste of time, answering questions we already know the answers to.
“Look, I don’t need a commission to tell me where there’s waste, fraud and abuse,” the GOP leader told reporters. “I don’t need a commission to tell us where we’re spending too much. I don’t need a commission to tell us we’re $31 trillion debt. Nobody needs a commission in the American public to tell us that we have spent too much, just like any family.”
Evidently, McCarthy has changed his mind. NBC News reported yesterday on what the House speaker told Fox News:
“After today, I’m going to put a commission together to look at the entire budget,” he said. He added, “I want to make it a bipartisan commission that we can be very serious about looking long term to solve this problem once and for all.”
Right off the bat, you might be asking yourself, “Wait, haven’t there already been a bunch of fiscal commissions”? The answer is, “Oh my, yes.”
In fact, Ezra Klein put together a good summary on this 10 years ago: “Here is a partial list of bipartisan budget negotiations we’ve had since 2010: The Simpson-Bowles Commission. The Domenici-Rivlin commission. The Cantor-Biden talks. The Obama-Boehner debt-ceiling negotiations. The Gang of Six talks. The ‘Supercommittee.’ The Obama-Boehner fiscal-cliff talks. All these negotiations have one thing in common: They ultimately failed.”
Quite right. What’s more, they failed because, in each instance, the commissions asked Republicans to make some concessions on taxes that the party refused to consider.
What’s more, the idea that Congress might benefit from, as McCarthy put it, “a commission together to look at the entire budget” is especially odd given that there’s already a House…
Read the full article here