It’s official: Obama’s debt reduction commission has failed. Not surprisingly, former SEIU boss Andy Stern was among those who voted against the plan.

The closely-followed US debt commission failed to pass its deficit reduction plan Friday, once more pushing back hard choices about America’s ballooning national debt.

Only 11 of the group’s 18 members backed the plan, three short of the 14 required to send it to the House of Representatives and Senate for a vote.

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Even those who voted against it had strong words for the deficit.

“This is the issue of our time that must be solved,” said labor leader Andy Stern, who nonetheless voted “no” because he favored fewer spending cuts and more tax increases.

When the commission’s co-chairmen issued their proposal [in PDF] on November 10th, its recommendations were roundly criticized by conservatives (like RedState’s Erick Erickson and Congressman Paul Ryan), as well as labor’s leftists—but for much different reasons. Through their opposition to making substantive cuts to the deficits that are quickly driving America into bankruptcy, union bosses seem intent on steering future generations of Americans into poverty.

When the debt commission’s report was released, the nation’s union bosses began bellowing their opposition in the strongest terms possible.  In fact, AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka belched out a statement:

“The chairmen of the deficit commission just told working Americans to ‘Drop Dead,’” Trumka said. “Especially in these tough economic times, it is unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare.”

In the face of the debt commission’s austerity proposals, and as leftists so often do, union bosses quickly assembled its own “commission” (read ‘shadow group‘) called the Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future to come up with its own Keynesian solution to the debt.

The unions’ commission speedily released its own set of union solutions on Tuesday and, unsurprisingly, the union solution was not to cut runaway government spending, but to spend even more money.

The Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future, a grassroots coalition of labor leaders and economists, on Tuesday released its own recommendations for cutting the deficit.

In a press conference call, the Citizens’ Commission recommended spending $1 trillion over the next two years to stimulate the economy and deferring budget cuts until after unemployment has dropped to 5.5 percent.

As opposed to reigning in deficit spending, the unions bosses’ delusional solution is to simply saddle more America with more unsustainable debt.  This leads one to wonder, after bankrupting so many companies and crippling so many industries, have they not yet learned that their style of economics does nothing but make people poorer?

We can’t spend our way to prosperity, and we can’t recover from a recession by creating a depression. It’s too bad union bosses don’t get these simple facts.

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.”  Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

X-posted.

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