Friday, November 18, 2011

The Super Committee’s Super Sellout on Farm Spending

Now, it looks like in addition to failing its charge to reduce the deficit, the Super Committee is also about to destroy the Republican brand. Capitol Hill Republican leaders are proposing tax increases, phony spending cuts and secret spending deals as they try desperately to make it look like Republicans accomplished something in last summer’s debt ceiling deal -- besides giving Obama a blank check for over $2 trillion in new spending. The problem is the Republican leadership is proving itself genetically incapable of actually standing on principle to cut spending. Witness their efforts to include a secret farm spending bill in the Committee’s deficit reduction legislation as the latest sell-out to leak from the Super Committee’s secret deliberations. The Farm Bill, which is renewed every five years, is one of the largest pork barrels on Capitol Hill. Far from being merely a farm subsidy program, the Farm Bill includes such urban liberal programs as food subsidies, environmental and land conservation programs. This year, as fate would have it, the election calendar necessitated that the Farm Bill (in all of its pork-filled glory) would have to be written and voted on in the middle of an election year, where balancing the budget and fiscal probity would be two of the major issues. The answer from the GOP’s Congressional leadership is a classic Washington insider maneuver: write the new Farm Bill in secret as part of the Super Committee’s deficit reduction package...more

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