CHICAGO ICON WONDERS ABOUT FISCAL DEBT

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KATHY POSNER'S VIEW FROM CHICAGO
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Kathy Posner

In January of this year, New Hampshire Republican U.S. Senator Judd Gregg and North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad jointly proposed the creation of a task force that would tackle the job of finding ways to reduce the national debt. Their Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action Act died in the Senate on Jan. 26th. But, President Obama liked the idea so much he said he would create the task force by Executive Order; so came into being the bi-partisan deficit panel. The panel has 18 members, 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans. Obama chose six members and the remaining 12 members were chosen by the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate. A requirement that 14 members support any recommendations it sends to Congress effectively gives the Republicans veto power. Why would anyone who serves on this panel matter to us in Illinois? It was nice when Senator Durbin was named because that gave us a representative on the panel; but what were the odds that out of 435 Congressmen available to be picked, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would pick Rep. Jan Schakowsky to be a member? Illinois was already represented by Durbin on the panel. What was Pelosi thinking? Illinois has the second worst debt-rating in the nation and yet two out of the 18 panel members are from our state? Why aren’t lawmakers for a financial task force picked from states that know how to control their finances? Pelosi’s other two choices might make sense because Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, is chairman of the House Budget Committee and Representative Xavier Becerra of California is a member of the Budget and Ways and Means committees; but Schakowsky sits on neither of those committees. Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, pled guilty in 2006 to failing to pay withholding taxes and bank fraud involving check kiting -- writing checks on accounts without sufficient funds to cover them while moving money between accounts and playing the so-called float to prevent the checks from bouncing and he served time in prison. Schakowsky herself served on the board of the now-defunct Illinois Public Action Council, co-signing the tax returns that implicated her husband in those federal crimes. If she did not know what was happening fiscally in her own home, how can we expect her to understand complicated fiscal issues that will have an impact on every household in the United States? She recently proposed a $100 million Illinois bail out of Shore Bank (not in her district) which would be the first-ever state bank bail out in history. She did not propose anything like that when the Bank of Lincolnwood failed last year and it IS located in her district! Schakowsky recently voted to raise the national debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion, to $14.3 trillion and has stood faithfully by the side of Speaker Pelosi who has added $4 trillion to the national debt, more than twice the rate of her predecessor. I spoke with Joel Pollak the Republican who is running in the 9th District of Illinois and hopes to replace Schakowsky. He said to me, “The lesson of past experience with deficit panels in other countries is that they work best when they are fully transparent, when their members have credibility on fiscal issues, and when they are conducted in a non-partisan fashion. On all three of these counts, Rep. Schakowsky fails. “Of course, one would expect her opponent to make such statements; but politics aside, they are true! Editorial boards are always lamenting about the unsavory power of many of our political leaders and how we need to vote them out. I don’t live in the 9th District, so I can’t vote Schakowsky out; but there are 653,647 (including children) people who can. That district has not had a Republican Congressman since Robert Twyman in 1949. After 61 years, it’s time for a change. Isn’t that what Obama says?
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