The Purpose of the Supercommittee

Nancy Pelosi was angry about having been rendered essentially irrelevant in the debt ceiling negotiations, and she got her revenge, spiking her slate of nominees to the "supercommittee" with liberals who either fail to understand or else fail to care about the fiscal crisis rapidly engulfing the United States.

Exhibit 1 is James Clyburn, who has announced that he hopes to use his seat on the supercomittee to, as the Hill puts it, "close the growing gully that divides the rich and the poor in America."

Note that his goal isn't to put America on a fiscally sustainable path again, or to increase the country's prosperity. Like all real lefties, he doesn't seem to care if everyone has less as long as no one has more than anyone else. This approach is reminiscent of Barack Obama's ideology -- even if a lower capital gains tax rate would result in more money for the federal Treasury, said Candidate Obama, a higher capital gains tax rate might be better anyway for "purposes of fairness."

Clyburn obviously has no interest in doing anything on the supercommittee besides trying to use the tax code as a weapon for social leveling. It is inconceivable that he will support any kind of cuts in government spending; instead, he obviously will spend his time pushing for nothing but higher taxes (which Democrats couldn't even pass when they controlled the presidency, the House and the Senate).

Under the blueprint for the supercommittee, any plan that wins a majority of the committee's votes is guaranteed a vote by the House and Senate -- with draconian cuts across the board if it fails.

Let us hope that the rest of the supercommittee understands that they have been appointed to try to dig America out of the fiscal hole that the Obama "stimulus" and the continuing jobless Obama economy have created -- not to engage in social engineering. Let us hope that they understand that the best way to promote growth -- which will both create jobs and provide the least painful way of addressing the skyrocketing deficit -- is to reduce taxes and regulations, not heap them on.

Then again, with "luminaries" like Senator John Kerry (and Senator Patty Murray, who will be simultaneously co-chairing the supercommittee and chairing the 2012 Democratic Senate campaign committee) on the supercommittee, best not to hold your breath. Tax increases, social leveling and demagoguery will be the Democrat order of the day.