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Now that the "super-duper committee" has failed to do Congress' job, it's time for Congress to get back to work on reducing ballooning deficits.

That was Rep. Tim Huelskamp's assessment of the situation in Washington when he spoke Monday to the Salina Noon Rotary Club just hours before the deadline for a bipartisan panel of 12 representatives and senators to come up with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases totaling $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years.

The panel, which has not met for weeks, "decided to declare failure," said Huelskamp, R-Kan.. He added that the failure was "not unexpected" and the committee was a bad idea to begin with.

"I opposed it," Huelskamp said. "The responsibility lies with myself and every other member of Congress."

He also noted that the so-called supercommittee was meeting behind closed doors, and even he and other members of Congress knew very little of what was being discussed.

"That's no way to make policy," said Huelskamp, who represents Kansas' 1st Congressional District.

The failure of the super committee to reach a deal is supposed to trigger across-the-board cuts in spending, which some have called "draconian," but Huelskamp was skeptical.

"Whether the committee had succeeded or failed, there would have been no cuts until after January of 2013, after the election," Huelskamp said. "It's just pushing the can down the road."

Avoiding hard choices

Besides, Huelskamp said, Congress has a history of approving spending cuts for the future, and then voting to avoid them later.

As an example, he cited a 1997 law that was supposed to begin cutting Medicare reimbursements to doctors.

"For 14 years now, Congress has every year voted to put it off for another year," he said.

And even if the $1.2 trillion in cuts resulting from the super committee's failure are really made, they're just reductions in the rate of spending growth, Huelskamp said. Defense spending is expected to increase 20 percent in the next 10 years without the cuts -- and 18 percent with them; interest on the $15 trillion national debt is expected to increase 152 percent by 2021 -- or 136 percent if the cuts take place.

Credit card maxed out

Currently, Huelskamp said, the United States is in the position of someone who's making the minimum payment on credit cards, and it's estimated the interest payment alone will be $1 trillion annually by the end of the decade.

Huelskamp said he'd recently been talking with a constituent, who told him the debt wasn't really a problem, because "nobody's going to pay that back."

But Huelskamp said he'd also recently spoken with a high-ranking finance official in China's government, which has loaned the U.S. government around $1.3 trillion, and "He expects to be paid back."

n Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by email at mstrand@salina.com.

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