Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich tells Newsmax that the supercommittee charged with devising means to cut the federal budget deficit is “a terrible way to govern.”
The former House speaker says: “I think the supercommittee is a very bad idea. You take 535 House and Senate members, you shrink them down to 12. The 12 are handpicked by the political leadership of the two parties so they’re guaranteed to be partisan. You then have too few meetings, no public meetings that matter, you come up with some gigantic bill that you try to ram through using fear tactics. I think it’s a terrible way to govern.
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“My advice to the supercommittee is: First, reform the Congressional Budget Office, whose bureaucratic models kill innovation and growth. Second, look at really big solutions to modernize the federal bureaucracy.
“Third, look for more revenue, not higher taxes. If you open up more oil and gas exploration, you get more federal revenue. If you open up the land we own in Alaska and Nevada, you get more federal revenue. If you get people back to work, you get reduced costs because they’re not getting food stamps, unemployment, public housing, Medicaid. On the other hand, they are paying taxes.
“There are things they could do that would enable us to have a positive outcome. I don’t see any sign that they’re moving in that direction. I see every sign that it’s kind of a standard partisan bickering, and frankly not a very creative project that’s under way.”
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