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Has the Super Committee Found Its Kryptonite?

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is appointing Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) to the new “super committee” tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction by Nov. 23.

 

According to National Taxpayer Union’s BillTally system, which looks at and puts a dollar figure to all legislation introduced, in the last Congress Senator Murray, the 31st largest spender in the Senate and who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, offered up $162 billion in new spending and could only find $148 million in government spending that she would cut?  Senator Baucus, the 48th biggest spender in the chamber, offered up $66 billion in new spending and could only find $8 million in the trillions that the federal government spends, that he would cut.

 

Senator Kerry, the 21st biggest spender in the Senate, offered up $234 billion in new spending and only $1 billion in cuts.  Senator Kerry is also all for people paying their “fair share” as long as it isn’t him.  The Senator, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a six-figure state tax bill on his multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport,R.I.

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appointed Senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio).  In the 111th Congress Senator Kyl called for $31 billion in new spending and $94 billion in new cuts to spending.   While new to the Senate, Senator Portman, when he was in the House in the 108th Congress, had a big spending agenda, calling for $13 billion in new spending and only $890 million in spending cuts.

 

Fellow Republican freshmen Senator Pat Toomey, while not a social conservative, campaigned on being a fiscal one – however that is not shown in his last BillTally Report from the 108th Congress.  In that Congress then Rep. Toomey advocated for $47 billion in new spending and only $10 billion in spending cuts.  Previous BillTallys show the same trend for calling for increased spending.

 

Having Senators Toomey and Portman on the committee make them the only Republicans on the committee who did not have an overall BillTally agenda that called for reducing government spending.

 

On the House side Speaker Boehner appointed Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) as House GOP members of the deficit reduction “super committee.”   Rep. Camp called for $22 billion in new spending in the 111th Congress while also advocating for $92 billion in spending cuts.  Fellow Michigander Rep. Upton called for $24 billion in new spending and $50 billion in spending cuts.

 

Rep. Hensarling has the second best BillTally numbers of the whole House of Representatives.  In the 111th Congress he only introduced $2 billion in new spending, while calling for $305 billion in spending cuts.

 

All of the Members of the committee who were in Congress in the 110th Congress voted for the 2-year extension of the tax cuts from 2001 and 2013 which extended tax relief on issues like the child tax credit and the marriage penalty, however it also increased the Death Tax from 0% to 35%.  The Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.


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