Are we entering Ho-Hum Land again?

The President’s Debt Commission has begun to list the areas where we can cut Washington’s spending. It will also suggest what we might do to bring in more money.

Commissions are a piece of cake. Any president can form one. Any president can boast that “I created a commission to tackle this problem, but Congress failed to…”  And all that.

President Reagan invited tycoon Peter Grace to form a commission to tackle government waste. It suggested thousands of ways Washington could save our tax dollars. Grace knew how to garner headlines for those suggestions. Millions of folks took notice and took heart. And then we all snuggled off to Ho-Hum Land. Congress used copies of the report as doorstops.

Congress loves to do things in big ways, in CAPITAL LETTERS with exclamation points!!! And so, when it decided to ignore the Grace Commission’s report it did so in a big way. It TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY, COMPLETELY ignored the suggestions.

The report said that one-third of all the income tax we pay swirls down a toilet called waste and inefficiency. Ignore it, said Congress. The report said one-third of taxes that ought to be collected don’t get collected. That was because of the size of our underground economy, where no tax gets collected. Only one-third? Ignore it, said Congress.