Obama Debt Commissioner: If America Knew, We'd Have a "Total Cremation"

Last Thursday, President Obama created a commission to "study the growing U.S. deficit," in other words, buy more time for Congressional Big Spenders. The guys heading this group will be a former Clinton chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, and a former Republican senator, Alan Simpson. Obama explained his action this way:

Federal debt has exploded, the trajectory is clear and it is disturbing, but the politics of dealing with chronic deficits is fraught with hard choices and therefore it is treacherous to office-holders here in Washington.

You can't say the man doesn't have a sense of humor. 

Here's the scenario: Washington politicians were just innocently sitting in their offices, minding their own business, when suddenly--KABOOM--the federal debt exploded, making the path "treacherous" for those guileless "office-holders."

The heroic 18 members of the federal debt clean-up squad, otherwise known as the "National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform" will, in Obama's words, “attempt the impossible," that is, attempt to put America on the path to fiscal responsibility by 2015. The Great HopeMaster, try as he might, can't seem to summon up hope for coming to terms with debt. In my experience, that's a common problem for Big Spenders.

Maybe the messengers of fiscal responsibility aren't quite as valiant as President Obama is making them out to be. Even merely advisory proposals of ways to balance the budget (nothing the Commission advises will have to go to a vote) are still mighty touchy incendiary devices for those who have based their elections, year after year, on votes bought via big government programs paid for by mostly small-pocketed taxpayers. Bloomberg.com has reported that Commission head Alan Simpson told an interviewer:

[W]e don’t dare put out a report before Election Day or it’ll be total cremation and we’ll have to move to the top of Mount Somewhere -- Erskine and I -- somewhere living up there like hermits.

Let me see if I got that right. If a Democrat and a Republican submit their ideas for getting America on the track to fiscal responsibility between now and Election Day, Congressional incumbents--both Democrat and Republican--can kiss re-election goodbye?


I think that's what many Americans already have in mind. 


Hat tip: EconomicPolicyJournal.com.

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