This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 17th, 2011.

I'm Kayla Brown.

The new Super Committee or Super Congress that's been charged with coming up with another trillion or

so dollars in deficit reduction might be best off doing nothing and letting an

automatic process of spending cuts take effect. So says Dan Mitchell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

The Super Committee is a creation of that debt limit compromise where they mostly kicked the can down the road but they did agree to set up this

committee six members of the house six members of the Senate half Democrats

half Republicans and this super committee ostensibly is going to come up with somewhere between

1.2 and 1.5 trillion dollars of deficit reduction. Now a few caveats, deficit

reduction means against a baseline so if they say they're cutting

spending all they're really doing is reducing the rate of growth of spending. And of course the

big worry is that if we're talking about deficit reduction not spending

reduction it means that they can put tax increases on the table and indeed that is

the number one political objective of

Obama and the Democrats on the committee is to seduce Republicans into some sort of tax increase

trap. And of course when they say deficit reduction they're not talking about

this year they're talking about over a long time frame.

Yeah we're talking about a 10 year time frame here so even though we have this giant

bloated nearly four trillion dollar budget and even though that budget could

easily be cut by 1.5 trillion dollars.

No, we're not talking about actually reducing spending next year or even reducing

the deficit next year.

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