Avoiding The "Deficit Commission" Trap

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal's staff editorial was an excellent piece warning Congressional Republicans to avoid becoming involved with the Democrats' latest cover for their deficit spending, the so-called "deficit commission."

I like New Hampshire's Republican Senator Judd Gregg quite a bit, but he's being naive on this issue.

The editorial recounts the various steps the liberal Democrats will take to slow roll their GOP counterparts.

By getting some Republicans on the panel, they will automatically have cover for "doing something" about the deficit, thus deflecting their party-line run-up of the deficit by a trillion dollars or more earlier this year.

Sooner or later, the commission's Democrats will force the group to state that higher taxes are the only "solution" to the former's reckless spending.

Instead, the editorial counsels,

"The Democrats will use a tax-and-spend commission to confront Republicans with the false choice between huge tax increases or fiscal disaster. Republicans should respond with their own choice: They'll agree to a deficit commission only if it takes tax increases off the table and forces all of Washington to confront the hard spending trade-offs between guns and butter, old and young, the poor and middle class, and social welfare and corporate welfare. Otherwise, Democrats should be forced to defend and finance their own destructive fiscal choices."

Here's another idea. Republicans beg off of this commission until they take back one or both Houses next November. Then they leave the debt ceiling alone and begin slashing federal spending while decreasing the federal debt ceiling.

Now that would be a path to longer term Republican control of Congress with a conservative slant that would be healthy for the US in the coming decades.