Is ‘Gang of Six’ Plan More Smoke and Mirrors?

Gang of Six plan is more smoke and mirrors
By: Examiner Editorial | 07/20/11 8:05 PM

Forty-nine senators drawn from both sides of the aisle were given a five-page plan Tuesday that described the major "starting concepts" agreed to by the Gang of Six (Go6) for fixing the federal budget. Many of the attending senators emerged from the briefing by the plan's authors praising the proposal as "responsible," "bipartisan" and "achievable." The truth is the Go6 plan is another collection of hollow promises, vague commitments and high-sounding declarations that are worth no more than the paper on which they were printed. The document purports to "slash our nation's deficits" by $3.7 trillion over 10 years, but to get there it raises taxes $2 trillion now in return for mostly undefined spending cuts to be enacted somewhere off in an ill-defined future. Does anybody seriously doubt that the professional politicians will waste no time in adopting the tax increases, then find a hundred excuses for delaying the spending cuts and deficit reductions until they are a dead letter?

And since, according to its authors, the "plan" presently is only "concepts," it's not clear why the Go6 plan was made public yesterday except to distract from House passage of a real law, the Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011, that raises the debt ceiling and mandates concrete federal spending cuts now and for a decade hence (it also calls for a balanced-budget amendment that many Washington hands consider impossible to pass). No wonder Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., one of the Go6 authors, admitted that the plan "has not been drafted, nor has it been scored by the Congressional Budget Office -- it's not ready for prime time."