With ten days to go before the Supercommittee reaches its deadline to release a deficit reduction plan, one Democratic member of the committee described a Republican tax reform proposal as unrealistic, while his Republican colleague suggested that Congress might not pull the trigger on automatic cuts if the committee fails to reach an agreement.
“We’ve got to come up with a plan that CBO will score, not that [Sen.] Pat Toomey [R-Pa.] will dream about,” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, of his Supercommittee colleague’s proposal. “And it’s a dream, I believe, that if you do this and if you do that, it will create all this dynamic growth. Dynamic scoring is not the way to do that.”
Clyburn also said that a Democratic proposal to count, as deficit reduction, money projected as war spending — but that everyone knows will not be spent in any case — is “much more realistic then this so-called pro-growth economy” plan that Toomey proposed.
Gridlock would seem to require massive automatice cuts across the board, with half of the $1.2. trillion in defict reduction coming out of the defense budget, but Toomey suggested those cuts might not go into effect.
“I think it’s very likely that Congress would reconsider the configuration of that sequestration and considers, is this really the best way to do it?” he told host Chris Wallace.
Clyburn did acknowledge that “About two-thirds of what Pat Toomey has put on the table I am for, I’ll tell you.”
