Thomas Sowell‘s latest column at Human Events offers his take on the ideas emanating from the deficit reduction commission led by retiring UNC system President Erskine Bowles and former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson:
Another deficit reduction commission has now made its recommendations. My own recommendation for dealing with deficits would include stopping the appointment of deficit reduction commissions.
It is not the amount of money that these commissions cost that is the issue. It is the escape hatch that they provide for big-spending politicians.
Do you go ahead and spend the rent money and the food money– and then ask somebody else to tell you how to escape the consequences?
If President Obama or the Congress were serious about keeping the deficit down, they could have had this commission’s recommendations before they spent hundreds of billions of dollars, handing out goodies hither and yon to their pet constituencies.
I don’t know why people agree to serve on these bipartisan commissions, which save the political hides of the big spenders after they have run up huge deficits. Back in the 1950s, there was a saying: “If you didn’t invite me to the take-off, don’t invite me to the crash landing.”
