No deal on deficit reduction

What happened

The congressional supercommittee formed to forge a bipartisan deal to reduce the deficit admitted defeat this week, triggering an automatic $1.2 trillion in cuts to defense and entitlement spending next year. The panel of six Republicans and six Democrats did not even come close to a deal that both parties could swallow. Republicans refused to go beyond their proposal to raise $300 billion in additional revenues while cutting the top tax rate, and Democrats refused to make major cuts to entitlement programs without at least $1 trillion in new taxes. Supercommittee member Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Republicans repeatedly insisted they could not violate the pledge against raising taxes authored by conservative activist Grover Norquist. “Grover Norquist has been the 13th member of the supercommittee without being there,” Kerry said. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said Democrats were only interested in raising taxes, and failed to provide a plan for cutting Medicare and Social Security spending. “Our Democratic friends were never willing to do the entitlement reforms,” Kyl said.

The supercommittee’s failure to reach a deal triggered automatic 10-year “sequestration” cuts to the federal budget, including $454 billion from defense and $123 billion from Medicare. But congressional defense hawks are already exploring ways of undoing the Pentagon cuts before they kick in on Jan. 1, 2013. President Obama said he would veto any attempt to alter or undo them. “The only way these spending cuts will not take place is if Congress gets back to work and agrees on a balanced plan,” he said. “They’ve still got a year to figure it out.”

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What the editorials said

“Thank you, Grover Norquist,” said The Wall Street Journal. The supercommittee’s failure wasn’t just a symptom of congressional dysfunction, but also “a product of divided government and a clash of political visions.” Democrats are sticking firm to President Obama’s plans to expand government and raise taxes, while Republicans share Norquist’s goal of cutting spending and the size of government. Voters will have to decide which direction the country should go. “Sounds like we need an election.”

Even an election won’t solve our deficit problem, said The Washington Post. It might give us a new president and a reshuffled Congress, but it is unlikely to produce a “clear mandate for either party’s vision of debt reduction.” Our political system will still require the victors to compromise with the losers. So, while the supercommittee’s failure means that “the debt-reduction can has been kicked once again,” there will be no deal until our political parties relinquish their “ideological rigidity.’’

What the columnists said

Where was President Obama during these negotiations? asked Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Major budget deals require presidential pressure and cajoling, but Obama contributed only a “few phone calls and tepid public statements” to the process. Obama obviously wanted the supercommittee to fail, said Alana Goodman in CommentaryMagazine.com. Since he can’t run on his dismal record, he plans to blame the “do-nothing Congress,” and the supercommittee’s failure gives him a “ton of fodder for his re-election bid.”

It’s absurd to blame Obama, said Derek Thompson in The​Atlantic​.com. Republicans reflexively oppose everything he suggests, and the idea that he could suddenly convince them to rip up their anti-tax pledges “fails the smell test.” The GOP never had any intention of compromising, said Andrew Rosenthal in NYTimes​.com. That’s why they proposed a “series of ever-smaller cuts to the deficit,” as well as a plan to cut tax rates for the rich. Their goal was to sabotage any deal, and “keep the economy as weak as possible until Election Day 2012.”

Republicans may regret that calculated gamble, said Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. Obama now holds the trump card—the “dual-trigger nightmare” of $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts and the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, both due in January 2013. Unless Republicans can get Democrats to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal over the next year, the triggers will cut the deficit by more than $7 trillion over the next decade, with a 3:1 ratio of tax increases to spending cuts. That prospect—horrifying to the GOP—puts Democrats “in the driver’s seat.”