Nashville Representative Jim Cooper says he’s hoping for a “miracle” from the Congressional supercommittee tasked with finding a trillion dollars in budget cuts. Cooper says automatic cuts are likely to happen instead, and he’s worried what will follow.
Cooper sits on the House armed services committee, and says most of the automatic cuts would hit defense spending. He says that’s on top of 450 billion dollars the military already has to trim out over the next decade.
“So you’d be cutting by a trillion, maybe even a trillion and a half dollars. Where do you get that sort of money? Are you going to get rid of the Army or something? This is crazy. Now nothing is that extreme, but even by downsizing the forces by a couple hundred thousand troops, that’s seriously changing our defense posture in the world.”
For all the hand-wringing over the potential fallout from the deficit deal, Cooper notes automatic cuts wouldn’t start until 2013. That means a newly-elected Congress would still have time to change course.
Healthcare
Cooper says skepticism over the Congressional supercommittee could not be higher. If the group doesn’t produce a plan this month to cut a trillion federal dollars, automatic cuts will happen instead. Some people think that’s a good thing, but Cooper worries what might follow.
The automatic cuts wouldn’t touch Medicaid, and would cut two percent from what Medicare pays providers. That’s the best outcome many healthcare lobbyists think they can get, so they’re hoping the supercommittee fails – a stance Cooper calls “selfish.”
“But I ask those folks to put the nation first. We are all Americans, we want a strong country, and let’s not do any damage to our country.”
Cooper was speaking at a conference of healthcare executives. He told WPLN if the country can’t get a grip on its debt, he worries foreign investors will lose confidence in the dollar.
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