Neil Cavuto: Tea Party Didn’t Cause the Debt Crisis, Try the Politicians

Jan,
The Gang of Six bill is fucked up. It’s a terrible plan.

From a previous post:

The so-called Gang of Six Plan…adopts a $500 billion down payment and a later reform bill generating an additional $3.2 trillion in deficit reduction. That later bill is largely left up to committees of jurisdiction, and they are only required to meet specific savings targets.
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/house-passes-cut-cap-and-balance-bill/

More, via NRO:

It’s a terrible, terrible plan. It will hand the president a huge strategic victory and deliver nothing that the GOP should be seeking in this fight. It’s far, far worse than anything we have seen thus far, and certainly much worse than the McConnell plan.

In a nutshell, the Gang of Six plan would have three parts. Let’s look at each part in turn.

First, there’s a relatively small bill to supposedly save $500 billion immediately with a combination of discretionary spending caps through 2015, a move toward the chained CPI for indexing Social Security and the tax brackets, repeal of the CLASS Act, and other unspecified process provisions. Although unstated, presumably it is this bill that would carry a temporary debt-limit increase to get past August 2, and probably provide about six months of room before another debt-limit increase became necessary.

Republicans must understand that even in this small, initial part of the package, the Democrats are insisting on a tax hike. The chained-CPI proposal will increase taxes along with slowing inflation increases in Social Security.

The second part of the Gang of Six package is far worse. It’s essentially a call for a budget “reconciliation” bill, with no specifics yet available. Senate committees with jurisdiction over taxes and entitlements would be tasked with achieving targeted amounts of savings or tax increases. For instance, the Finance Committee would be charged with reporting out a tax-reform plan that increases taxes by about $2.3 trillion over a decade. That committee would also be charged with finding savings in Medicare and Medicaid, but there’s absolutely no indication of how the savings will be achieved.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/272311/gang-six-disaster-worst-plan-so-far-james-c-capretta

Again:
Any budget needs to include spending and tax cuts along with a balanced budget plan.
Think about how the average family has to figure out their bills from month to month. When the government spends beyond the taxpayer’s means we pay the price.

SFC MAC