WHAT'S NEXT FOR CONGRESS?

Congress, our dysfunctional and unloved branch of government, has a bit more than a week of unearned vacation before returning to "work" and resuming its political posturing and partisan ways. If that seems a bit harsh, I'm sorry but their deliberations have more the character of a mantra than a serious dialog for resolving differences of opinions and policy choices.

There will be a new guy on the block, however. With its inability to resolve the spending cuts/new revenues issues through its normal byzantine procedures, before going on vacation it resorted to creating a Special Committee or Super Congress to come up with a new round of spending cuts and/or new revenues that will accompany further increases in the debt ceiling. How this newly rigged process will turn out remains to be seen, but with the requirement that this Super Whatever come up with a new fiscal plan by Thanksgiving, we won't have too long to wait.

But of one thing we can be reasonably assured, the GOP center of ideological gravity will continue to be reliance on big spending reductions, accompanied by corporate tax cuts, while the Democrats will seek to leaven a solution with some revenue increases along with continued defense of health care entitlements. If we again get a GOP position of no compromise on new revenues and an equally firm Democratic response on entitlements, across the board spending cuts will be the legislatively prescribed alternative.

That alternative would hit particularly heavily on defense spending and the Pentagon has already started its traditional counteroffensive about the dire implications of deep cuts on national security. To this was usually added how newly discovered threats from a foreign source make cuts in the Pentagon budget even more dangerous. In the good old days the Pentagon could be counted on to have a report of some new Soviet threat such as a new missle or anti-missile system. Now it's China and just last week there was a report on the future dangers of Chinese development of stealth aircraft and aircraft carriers to threaten our future dominance of the western Pacific. So not much changes when the Pentagon feels its budget, currently $500 billion plus (not counting the money for two wars), is threatened.

So the return of Congress means the return to the fiscal battle, but with the Super
Whatever as the supposed final arbiter of how things will be resolved THIS YEAR. Ahead in 2012 still lies the more intense battles to be fought over what to do about the costly entitlement programs, particularly health care, and another shootout over whether some or all of the decade-old "temporary" tax cuts of the Bush administration should expire at the end of next year.

On track two of the returning Congress is likely to be a renewed fight over jobs and the economy. With the economic recovery just limping along, the outlook for new jobs and/or re-employing those already laid off is not very encouraging. But it is the issue which has driven and continues to drive public opinion about the failures of Washington to solve or even get good traction on the problem. In such instances in the past, the President, in this case Obama, has drawn the most fire for his presumed failure to get the economy moving again. Presidents get good marks when the economy is robust and they pay the price when it isn't. What this distills to is that jobs and the economy will once again break the surface as a dominant issue dividing Republicans and Democrats. With the presidential election just a little over a year away, there is likely to be a lot of clash and clang, if not progress, or as Shakespeare put it in a different context the air and airwaves will be "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

To this blogger, a big part of any solution has to be a meaningful stimulus program, even in the face of huge deficits and growing debts. The partisan difference is that the Democrats, or most of them, see the need to somehow get substantial money into the pockets of the consumer for immediate spending, plus a longer term program in the form of job creation through a new and large package aimed at building and repairing our infrastructure from roads and bridges to sewer lines.

Unfortunately, the GOP has a single and timeless mantra as its answer to the jobs problem. Cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations and let the money "trickle down" in a way that new jobs will be created. This posting will not again go into the fallacies of trickle down, voodoo economics, but the reader is referred to the recent postings of June 15 and 22 to show the dead end character of GOP job creation policy.

As journalists used to say in ending a story, "that's 30."