{"id":5954,"date":"2011-09-27T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T07:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=5954"},"modified":"2011-09-27T00:01:47","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T07:01:47","slug":"how-the-super-committee-can-solve-their-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/27\/how-the-super-committee-can-solve-their-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Super Committee can solve their problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">The Super Committee is tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in savings to prevent draconian across the board cuts if they fail to do so.&#160; Republicans are also anxious to prevent the alternative, because the automatic cuts would slash military spending, a cow almost as sacred to them as their Pope Grover.&#160; There is actually a rather obvious fix that can accomplish their goal overnight, if the Democrats on the committee refuse to allow Republican social engineering there.<\/font><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"27super-committee\" border=\"0\" alt=\"27super-committee\" align=\"left\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/27super-committee.jpg\" width=\"360\" height=\"256\" \/>It&#8217;s a move that&#8217;s been dismissed as a budget gimmick, but it&#8217;s also one that could make the supercommittee&#8217;s job a whole lot easier: <strong>counting the savings of withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>As the 12 lawmakers on the panel begin searching high and low for at least $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts, they are eyeing once-sacrosanct areas like entitlements and weighing huge projects like tax reform&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;But <strong>if the troop withdrawal is factored in, over a trillion dollars in savings is there for the taking<\/strong>, and at least for the time being, supercommittee members are not ruling it out.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Everything&#8217;s on the table,&quot; supercommittee member Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said, when asked if such savings should be considered as part of the panel&#8217;s mission.<\/p>\n<p>In the president&#8217;s proposal to cut the deficit, a major chunk of the savings in the bill comes from the withdrawal of troops following the &quot;surge.&quot; <strong>Those savings come about because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assumes war spending will stay at the temporary levels of last year for the next 10 years when scoring savings<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The White House says $1.1 trillion will be saved by drawing down those troops from Afghanistan and making the U.S. presence in Iraq a civilian, not a military, one<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Given that the supercommittee must track down at least $1.2 trillion in cuts to avoid the triggering of automatic cuts, simply accounting for those savings would nearly get the panel there all by itself&#8230; [<em>emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Inserted from &lt;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/headline\/2011\/09\/26-3\" target=\"_blank\">Common Dreams<\/a>&gt;<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Republicans will not agree to this easily.&#160; Remember that their goal has nothing to do with the deficit ort the debt.&#160; They are using these things as an excuse to push for privatizing Social Security, replacing Medicare with a coupon, replacing Medicaid with a voucher program, and destroying public employee unions.&#160; When they say there is no other way, this will prove they are lying.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">The savings can be further accelerated ending the occupation of Afghanistan.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Super Committee is tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in savings to prevent draconian across the board cuts if they fail to do so.&#160; Republicans are also anxious to prevent the alternative, because the automatic cuts would slash military spending, a cow almost as sacred to them as their Pope Grover.&#160; There is actually a <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/27\/how-the-super-committee-can-solve-their-problem\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}