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This was something I think anybody familiar with how Congress works expected to happen.
Did any body really expect these guys to cut the pork they give to the special interest groups that help them stay in power??? I would love to call them morons and say that are too stupid to tie their own shoes. But the real answer is these guys are not morons who are too stupid to cut spending, they are crooks who don't want to cut spending and have no intention of reducing the amount of stuff they steal from us. Supercommittee throws in towel; next steps are unclear Stalemate is no surprise to Arizona's delegation by Dan Nowicki and Erin Kelly - Nov. 22, 2011 12:00 AM The Arizona Republic Members of Arizona's Capitol Hill delegation were disappointed but not necessarily surprised by the meltdown of the deficit-reduction supercommittee, and they had no clear idea about what would happen next. The 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, commonly referred to as a supercommittee, was impaneled in August as part of a landmark compromise to increase the U.S. debt ceiling. It faced a Wednesday deadline to find ways to reduce the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years to avoid deep punitive spending cuts to defense and other priorities. The committee's Democratic and Republican co-chairs on Monday afternoon issued a joint statement declaring the effort dead. The supercommittee, lawmakers said, was a casualty of election politics and a partisan chasm over taxes and entitlement reform that in the end was too wide to bridge. "It is an apt reflection of the deep philosophical divisions between Republicans and Democrats, so I guess no one should have been surprised when it did not succeed," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told The Arizona Republic. Sen. Jon Kyl, the Senate GOP whip and the committee's only Arizonan, said Republican members made a good-faith effort to find common ground, offering a $640 billion proposal that included new revenue streams, but not tax increases, that Democrats rejected. "Each side will have its own story, and we'll blame the other guy, I suppose," a disappointed Kyl told The Republic after the negotiations fell apart for the final time. Congress likely can expect a new public backlash over the supercommittee's failure to come to terms on a deficit-cutting agreement, he said. "It's hard for Congress to be loathed any more than it already is," Kyl said. "We're already down to 9 percent approval. ... Maybe even our relatives will turn on us." The deficit-reduction committee's failure to reach a deal triggers about $1 trillion in automatic cuts over nine years, beginning in January 2013, unless Congress changes the rules. And President Barack Obama, who blamed Republican intransigence for the impasse, said Monday that he will veto any attempt by Congress to get around the spending cuts absent "a balanced plan to reduce the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion." Half of the cuts will come from defense, and half will come from non-defense programs. "(Defense) Secretary (Leon) Panetta said that if this sequestration were enacted, we would have the smallest Army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1915 and the smallest Air Force ever," McCain said. The full impact of the defense sequestration will soon come into focus once the Pentagon starts taking drastic steps to absorb the dramatic cuts, Kyl said. "They'll start notifying base closings and laying off personnel here pretty quickly," Kyl said. "When that starts to happen, people will wake up to the reality that we cannot let that happen." For his part, Kyl accused Obama of avoiding the deficit-reduction committee's negotiations so he could continue to campaign for re-election against a "do-nothing Congress" after the talks broke down. "I think they concluded that the economy was not going to get better soon enough to really help them and, instead, they would be better off having somebody to blame for the bad economy," Kyl said. "I think that was another reason why the president never engaged." Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., voted against the Aug. 1 debt-ceiling package because he was skeptical that the supercommittee idea would work. The partisan membership of the panel was a recipe for gridlock, he said. "The members were too partisan," said Pastor, the senior member of Arizona's House delegation. "They were dug in there. Some we put on there because of their partisanship. You could see that nothing was happening." Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., called the supercommittee's failure unfortunate in light of the hard work by Kyl and other members. "Many of us were hoping for a big deal ... that would put us on a more fiscally responsible course," Flake said. "The gulf is too wide, maybe." Freshman Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., said he was frustrated that an agreement was stymied by "politics as usual." "I've repeatedly said that tough decisions would have to be made and meaningful reforms brought to the table to solve our current spending crisis," Gosar said. "I am disappointed that this group was not able to meet this challenge." The Gannett Washington Bureau contributed to this article.
A polite way of saying "they are crooks"? Probably! Editorial: Why the 'supercommittee' failed By Karen Bleier, AFP/Getty Images Not only did the inaptly named "supercommittee" fail to reach a big agreement to get the debt under control, members proved incapable even of meeting the panel's minimum goal of cutting $1.2 trillion in deficits over 10 years. That sounds like a lot of money, but it's less than 3% of the roughly $46 trillion the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government will spend from 2012 to 2021. What financially strapped household or business can't figure out a way to save three cents of every dollar it spends? The supercommittee's failure brings the nation one step closer to a European-style debt crisis of rising interest rates and lower living standards. No one knows precisely when that day will arrive, but several bipartisan groups have spelled out what's needed to head it off: a balanced package that shaves at least $4 trillion off projected deficits in the next decade, with about three dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar in tax increases. So why couldn't the supercommittee save even a quarter of that amount? One reason is political polarization. The parties have made so many promises to their bases — on taxes, on entitlements — that compromise is seen as a sellout and shared sacrifice as unmentionable. Many members of Congress face more political risk from the wings of their own parties than from the other party. With elections coming up next year, they'd rather have the issue than a deal. Another reason the effort collapsed is that party leaders delegated the job to people with less clout — and less to lose from failure. Successful budget deals in the 1980s and 1990s, when compromise was still faintly possible, came together after party leaders sat down together, face to face, and hammered out an agreement. That's how then-Speaker Tip O'Neill, D-Mass., and President Reagan cut the deal to rescue Social Security in 1983, for example. President Obama tried a version of that approach earlier this year, negotiating with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on a $4 trillion "grand bargain." That process fell apart when Boehner, pressured by Tea Party members, walked away complaining about the amount of tax increases Obama wanted to do a deal — about 25% of the overall package. In fact, Republicans' obsessive drive to shield the wealthy from modest tax increases has been the biggest obstacle to a deal all year. Supercommittee Republicans finally offered an 11th-hour package of revenue increases, which Democrats rightly criticized as having too many strings attached. That should have been the start of productive talks, but it turned out to be a dead end. Democrats, though, are hardly blame-free. Obama took a largely passive role as the supercommittee bickered. And for months, the administration and key Democrats have clung to the erroneous notion that Social Security — the largest single program in the federal budget — needed no changes because it didn't add a penny to the deficit. The retirement program is already in the red, and CBO estimates it will add a half trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. The supercommittee's failure is bad enough, but what some lawmakers are proposing now would be worse — diluting the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts to be triggered in 2013 by the supercommittee's failure, on the grounds that the cuts will hurt national defense. Avoiding the cuts is their primary incentive for finding a solution. How like members of this Congress to agree to rules when it's convenient, but try to change them when it's not — even as they put the country at greater risk.
Sadly most people seem to believe in the fiction that the government can actually work for the people they pretend to serve, instead of our royal government rulers in Congress. The members of the U.S. Congress and U.S. Senate work for themselves and the special interest groups that help them get elected. They certainly don't work for us people and expecting them to stop stealing our money is like expecting an alcoholic to stop drinking. It ain't going to happen. A Failure Is Absorbed With Disgust and Fear, but Little Surprise By MICHAEL COOPER Published: November 21, 2011 Does the American political system even work anymore? Variations on that question kept coming up on Monday as Americans — at least those paying attention — absorbed the news that the Congressional committee charged with reducing the deficit had failed to even meet very often, let alone come up with a plan to get the country back in the black. From shoppers in Los Angeles to tourists in Atlanta to traders taking cigarette breaks outside the Chicago Board of Trade, the eye-rolling that often accompanies doings in Washington gave way to something bordering on dismay. “My reaction when I heard they failed was more emotional than anything,” said Elizabeth Weinraub, a 25-year-old retail manager, as she got her morning fix at a Los Angeles Starbucks. “I’m not even sure what that means in the grand scheme. But it was a bum-out.” The failure of the committee — which had been dubbed, with typical inside-the-Beltway grandiosity, the “supercommittee” — led to predictable, if bitter, kryptonite jokes. But it also prompted wrenching questions about whether Congress can be trusted to do its job: the committee, after all, was supposed to do the hard work that lawmakers had put off in August when they eventually agreed to avert default by raising the nation’s debt limit, waiting so long to do so that Standard & Poor’s lowered the United States’s credit rating. The idea of the committee was, in part, to save Congress from itself: let a dozen members forge a compromise to cut the deficit, and then put it to the whole Congress for an up-or-down vote. It was Congress lashing itself to the mast, like Odysseus, to resist the siren calls of lobbyists and special interest groups. But in the end, the ship went nowhere. People were not just annoyed: they were worried. Neil Elkins, 52, who works on boats on the Seattle waterfront, said that the failure was “endangering my confidence in our system of checks and balances.” Khalfani Lawson, a 23-year-old student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, said that the lack of progress was breeding apathy among the young. “If it was a constructive process, people would be more inclined to be involved.” And Ernest Wong, a 44-year-old from Los Angeles who works in marketing, put it bluntly: “This makes me scared.” Disgust with Congress even briefly seemed to unite members of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement and the traders they rally against. Marco Amaral, a 20-year-old student at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been a protest organizer with Occupy Cal, bemoaned the failure of elected officials to come together in the nation’s time of need. “The failure of the supercommittee does not reflect poorly on Republicans, Democrats or Obama, it reflects poorly on how our system works in general,” he said. “Our democracy isn’t working like it should.” Half a continent away, some outside the Chicago Board of Trade had a decidedly different worldview but a similar gut reaction. Mark Rosenberg, a 33-year-old trader at Cydonia Capital, summed up the mood this way: “Upstairs, they want to fire everyone in Congress because no one is doing their job.” A record 84 percent of Americans said they disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job in the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll last month. That is the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and a higher level of disapproval than was found after a political stalemate led to a federal government shutdown in 1995. The flip side of the coin is no better: Congress’s approval rating has sunk to 9 percent, the poll found, a record low. Senator Michael F. Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, created a chart showing that Congress now had less support than President Richard M. Nixon did during Watergate or BP did during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I think the whole situation is nutty,” said Jan O’Connell, a 47-year-old artist from Los Angeles. “Somebody’s got to save us, and if the government can’t, who can?” How the stalemate will play out politically is hard to gauge. Republicans on the committee rejected Democratic proposals that would have made cuts to entitlement programs, and held out for a deal that would have kept taxes on the wealthiest Americans low. Recent polls have found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed support raising taxes on the wealthy. And how the behind-the-scenes dealings of an obscure group of lawmakers in Washington will read after being retold by spin doctors in both parties is anyone’s guess. A Quinnipiac University poll released Monday found that American voters blame Republicans in Congress more than they do President Obama and Congressional Democrats by 44 percent to 38 percent, with a similar spread among independent voters. In Chicago, Brian Leonard Jr., a trader for Belvedere Trading who is a Republican, said that confidence in the political system had been damaged. “I think the Republicans need to step up and make this less about the election and more about the country as a whole,” he said. Many politicians and economists believed that expectations for a deal were so low that the market was already counting on the committee to fail. So when stocks fell sharply on Monday — attributed partly to the crisis in Europe, but also partly to the collapse in Washington — it came as an unpleasant surprise. Daniel Stecich, a trader with TJM Institutional Services in Chicago, said he blamed both parties for putting the economy at risk by not reaching a compromise that included both spending cuts and tax increases. “They better do something to make this market calm down,” he said. Jerry Ross, 78, an independent voter from Tucson who voted for Senator John McCain for president in 2008, said he was disillusioned. “I’m middle class, and I’m just annoyed by our politicians,” he said outside a shopping center in Los Angeles, where he was visiting with his family. “It’s criminal really.” Mr. Ross was concerned by the prospect of military cuts, which he called “ridiculous.” But he was flexible on the question of taxes. “I think the idea of taxing the multimillionaires a little bit more is not the worst thing in the world,” he said. “They can certainly afford to pay a little bit more.” In Atlanta, Micka Jones, a 71-year-old independent voter, said people should not be surprised at Washington’s latest failure. “Who thought it would be any different?” she asked. “The real news would be if they worked together.” Reporting was contributed by Ian Lovett, Steven Yaccino, Malia Wollan, Isolde Raftery, Robbie Brown and Allison Kopicki.
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