Well, I have to hand it to Obama: at least he trying to make an appearance of fiscal responsibility:
Trying to win the votes of fiscal moderates, President Barack Obama formally endorsed legislation Saturday creating an independent commission with the power to force Congress to vote on major deficit reduction steps this year, after the November elections.
Obama’s statement gives new momentum to efforts in the Senate now to attach such legislation this coming week to a pending debt ceiling bill. But the endorsement comes so late that it risks being seen as just a ploy to win over swing Democratic senators whose votes the White House needs to lift the federal debt ceiling.
“The President is demonstrating exactly the kind of leadership we need to tackle our nation’s long-term fiscal challenges,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), a lead sponsor of the legislation to create an independent deficit commission. “His support shows that he is determined to do what is necessary to put us back on a sound long-term course.”
Really, I can’t help but smile in amusement at the President’s sudden interest in fiscal responsibility. It’s not all that believable, because of two factors: one, he’s a Leftist Democrat and, two, he has a history of not showing any regard for the fiscal health of the Federal. Need I remind people that he said that the Federal government was out of money and then turned around and pushed through a huge pork bill masked as a stimulus bill.
What is even more amusing, as Matt Drudge pointed out, is that he plans on forming the commission after this year’s election. This is an obvious political move and really has nothing to do with balancing the budget and stopping the exponential growth of government and the national debt.
All that aside, let’s analyze the concept of creating a commission real quick. Basically, we have a serious problem: the Federal government is borrowing more money than it is confiscating from ordinary citizens. So the solution is to appoint a commission to determine what needs to be done? Now, I’m not all the sophisticated, in fact at best I am sophomoric on a good day, but why not just veto any budget that isn’t balanced? Once you do that, you hold a press conference, preempting some popular television show, explaining that Congress is giving drunken sailors a bad name and they need to shape up.
But instead, Obama appoints a commission to fix this problem. I can remember two very unproductive commissions during the Bush years that accomplished nothing. There was the 9/11 commission, which didn’t even take into account the Able Danger project, and the commission on tax reform, which determined that we need to rollback to what we did in 1988.
In short, this whole commission is nothing more than a facade, like many things done in government, and are really designed to keep the status quo while making the appearance that our beloved leaders are doing something.