It
looks less and less likely that the Congressional Supercommittee will agree on a deficit-cutting plan. James Pethokoukis
places the blame on "tax-obsessed" Democrats:
Yet Democrats used the SuperCommittee to push a trillion-dollar tax hike and block fundamental entitlement reform. As one GOP aide told Politico, “If they were willing to go a little further on entitlements, we’d see what we can do on revenues. That was the way it would have to work. What we found was, they needed a trillion-plus in revenues, and weren’t willing to do anywhere near that on entitlements.”
As I have been saying for months, Pethokoukis concludes that
(i)f Uncle Sam does need more revenue, pro-growth tax reform is the best way to get it. A host of studies from both liberal and conservative economists have found that eliminating the tax code’s bias against investment would boost long-term GDP growth by as much as 10 percent and add perhaps a full percentage point to annual GDP growth for a number of years.