A familiar impasse for the supercommittee

What happened

With its deadline drawing near, the congressional “supercommittee” tasked with cutting at least $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit over the next decade appeared headed for a deadlock this week, after Republican leaders said they would reject any plan that included tax increases. The six Democrats on the panel last week submitted a far-reaching plan to cut $3.2 trillion from the deficit by slashing $500 billion from entitlement programs such as Medicare and raising $1.3 trillion in new tax revenue. But House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said his caucus would never vote for new taxes. “It’s time for everybody to get serious,” he said. A Republican proposal, which aimed to cut $2.2 trillion from the deficit with a mixture of entitlement cuts and a revision of the tax code, was dismissed by House Democrats for failing to increase revenue. Erskine Bowles, who co-chaired President Obama’s debt-reduction commission last year, told the supercommittee in direct testimony to accept the need for both deeper spending cuts and $800 billion in new taxes. “I’m worried you’re going to fail—fail the country,” Bowles said.

Under a deal that Congress and Obama agreed on during August’s debt-ceiling battle, the supercommittee must send a 10-year deficit-reduction plan to Congress before Nov. 23. If no plan is created, it would automatically trigger $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts to the federal budget from 2013 onward—a process known as “sequestration”—including $454 billion from defense programs and $123 billion from Medicare. But Republicans suggested they may vote to cancel at least parts of the sequestration. “Congress is not bound by this,” said Sen. John McCain (R‑Ariz.). “If something is passed, we can reverse it.”

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What the editorials said

Nothing has changed since August, said The New York Times. Congress can’t agree on how to cut the deficit, and as usual, only one party “seems to be trying.” But even though the cuts proposed by the Democrats were “so large as to be imprudent,” the obstructionist GOP still refuses to consider new taxes. Clearly, nothing—not defense spending, nor the “country’s economic health”—is more important to Republicans than “protecting corporations and the wealthy from tax increases.”

But all the Democrats are offering are “nonstarters and gimmicks,” said the Lynchburg, Va., News & Advance. These are the same phony cuts and increased stimulus spending proposed by the president, with “no mention of real entitlement and tax reform.” As a result, we’ve got that “queasy feeling in the pit of our stomachs” that we’re heading toward another unfixable impasse.

What the columnists said

Our best option to trim the deficit might be to let the deadline pass, said Peter Suderman in Reason.com. The resulting cuts would be “hardly dramatic.” Medicare would be cut by only 2 percent, while defense spending would be capped at 2007 levels—a time when our defense budget represented 40 percent of global military spending. With genuine entitlement and tax reform looking unlikely, sequestration might be the “best plausible result” for deficit hawks. So go ahead, supercommittee. “Pull that trigger.”

That would be a disaster for national security, said Peter Morici in The Baltimore Sun. Our aging military hardware needs more investment, not less—especially at a time when Chinese military spending is on the rise. Once again, the hawks will win this argument, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com. Republicans will demand that the Pentagon be exempt from cuts, on the spurious basis that they would “leave America defenseless.” Democrats will cave in, for fear of appearing “soft on defense.” Meanwhile, domestic programs will be brutally cut.

Whether the supercommittee agrees on a plan or not, said Stan Collender in WashingtonMonthly.com, it won’t mean much in the long run. Congress has a long history of revising federal budget amendments almost as soon as the ink is dry. It’s “exceptionally unlikely” that a 10-year plan will go “unchallenged or unchanged.” In reality, only the $30 billion in cuts already agreed upon for 2012 are guaranteed—cuts and changes beyond that will be “changed, waived, ignored, or abandoned” by Congress long before they happen