The Super Committee Fails, Bring On The Sequestration Cuts
It appears as though the much-ballyhooed bicameral, bipartisan “super committee” has failed to reach an agreement on $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. You’ll remember that this super committee was formed by an agreement between congressional Republicans and President Obama to raise the national debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion.
Why anyone would think that $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years (with no agreement as to which budget baseline the cuts would come from) in exchange for raising the debt ceiling by over $2 trillion (an amount that will quickly be consumed by the trillion-dollar-a-year deficit we’re running now) was a good deal is beyond me.
It was a bad deal all along and, quite frankly, the the sequestration cuts were probably the most those of us concerned with real deficit reduction could hope for. Though, even the sequestration cuts which are already being described by “devastating” in some quarters, will have only a tiny impact on spending growth:
But if you think these cuts are actually going to happen, think again. Senator John McCain, among others, has already vowed to keep the defense spending cuts from going into effect, and if you think Democrats are going to let Republicans axe the defense cuts but leave in the cuts to government health care programs, you’ve got another thing coming.
You can expect the two parties to unite in a spirit of bipartisanship and agree on one thing: No sequestration cuts.
Which is just plain pathetic, isn’t it? Americans were sold on the debt cap increase by the suggestion that this super committee would result in cuts either through some sort of a compromise or through automatic cuts triggered by the lack of compromise.
Now it seems pretty clear we’re going to end up with nothing.
Tags: deficit, national debt, super committee
