Deadline Looms for Super Committee

As part of the August 2, 2011 deal to raise the debt ceiling, the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction (aka the “Super Committee”) was created to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.  This is in addition to an initial $1 trillion in spending cuts that was instituted immediately after the deal was signed.  Many believed that mid-November was the deadline to contact the Super Committee about specific ideas.  It now appears that taxpayers have once again been misled.  Multiple news reports indicate that October 14, 2011 is the real deadline to make formal recommendations to the Super Committee.

Many groups have been offering advice on where to cut spending.  In fact, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) held a Defense briefing on October 3 with representatives from the Lexington Institute, National Taxpayers Union, and Americans for Tax Reform to discuss potential spending cuts in the Department of Defense that wouldn’t affect national security.  The panelists recommended eliminating funding the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine and the Medium Extended Air Defense System (read previous blog postings here and here).  TPA has also recommended eliminating Community Transformation Grants funded through the Centers for Disease Control (read previous blog posting here).  Even with all these superb ideas coming out of TPA, and other groups, Congress doesn’t have to look much further than the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama and the National Commission on Fiscal Reform and Integrity for ideas.

Let’s start with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which detailed a number of spending cuts in its March 2011 report, “Reducing the Deficit: Spending and Revenue Options. “

The cuts are broken up into three categories:

• Mandatory – savings would total $29 billion in one year and $590 billion over five years;
• Discretionary (Defense) – savings would total $10 billion in one year and $178 billion over five years; and
• Discretionary (All Discretionary Activities Other Than Defense) – savings would total $13 billion in one year and $147 billion over five year.

All told these savings would be more than $900 billion over five years which include:

• Consolidate the Department of Defense’s Retail Activities and Provide a Grocery Allowance to members which could save $2.2 billion over five years.
• Replace the Joint Strike Fighter Program with F-16s and F/A-18s which could save $27 billion over five years.
• Eliminate the Department of Energy’s Grants to States for Energy Conservation and Weatherization which would save $907 million over five years.
• Eliminate Intercity Rail Subsidies which would save more than $10 billion over five years.

Not as meaty, but also worth considering, is the list President Obama released in February along with his fiscal year 2012 budget.  Fiscal Year 2012 Terminations, Reductions, and Savings outlines $33 billion in potential spending cuts.  While there are some good recommendations to cut spending, the total amounts to less than one percent of the $3.7 trillion budget and it fails to address entitlement spending, which is projected to be 64 percent of the budget.

Just about a year ago, the National Commission on Fiscal Reform and Integrity, a deficit reduction effort led by former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senate Whip Alan Simpson (R-Wy.), released a report on potential spending cuts.

The problem is and always has been the political will to make difficult decisions, not the lack of ideas.  Taxpayers hope that the Super Committee will make the tough decisions, but is difficult to forget that the committee is made up by some of the same people that got us into this mess in the first place.