Another Commission To Save Congress From Itself

On February 4 President Obama submitted his proposed budget to Congress, including the most spending and largest single year deficit in the history of America.

On February 18 he announced the formation of a yet another Washington “commission,” this one to study government deficits and recommend ways to reduce them, as if there were some mystery about how they occur.

He blamed Congress for the red ink, saying that “politics” kept them from making the decisions necessary to enact a balanced budget.

Obama created the deficit commission with a stroke of his pen, via an Executive Order, an act that violates the Constitution in as much  as Congress defeated Legislation that would have created the same commission just last week.    The government will lease office space, hire staff, purchase computers and equipment, and pay fees to outside “experts,” all without the Constitutionally required spending authority from Congress.  But nobody in the establishment media seems to have noticed or cared.

Obama has had a love-hate relationship with deficits since he took office.  The 19 second video below is from a speech to Congressional Democrats during the second week of his Presidency, when he and they were still intoxicated by their sweeping election victories.  They were eagerly planning to deploy their commanding majorities in the House and Senate to enact a radical, authoritarian agenda of government supervision of every aspect of American life.   They were about to pass the $787 Billion “stimulus” and had swept aside deficit warnings from Conservatives.

One year and another Trillion in debt later the President is trying to reinvent his image.  Now he wants is to believe he has the soul of a budget balancer, but is a victim of “politics.”

We’re told the deficit commission will last only until December of this year, a ridiculous promise considering the ways Washington works.  The government has run deficits in 67 of the past 78 years.  The notion that a commission can “solve” this problem and go out of business in ten months is preposterous.

Since the deficit commission is likely become a textbook example of a permanent bureaucracy, adding to the long term deficit, we thought this would be an ideal moment to repeat this presentation on how bureaucracies grow and evolve.  This phenomenon is as much a cause of deficits as anything else in Washington.