Debt committee disappointment

I’m disappointed.

I know I shouldn’t be. I know that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction was never given much credibility in Washington. Almost no one inside the Beltway believed that they would actually succeed. I know I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up that reason and common sense would prevail over election year politics. I should have known better.

They’re stuck between multiple rocks and hard places, the conventional wisdom says. On the left, they’ve got labor and the progressives, who will howl if the deal doesn’t include “revenue,” today’s buzzword for tax increases. On the right, they’ve got the Tea Party and the anti-tax crowd who will wail if the deal includes any tax increases or other revenue measures and doesn’t cut enough. From above, the pressure from the defense industry, veterans and the military who need a deal – any deal – to save them from sequestration, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has labeled “crippling” to the DOD. And from below you have the dozens of retiree groups who want to see absolutely no changes to social security, medicare and medicaid.

About the only thing of value that kind of pressure creates is diamonds. In politics, it creates stalemate. Normally stalemate is okay. But not here.

And that’s one of the reasons why I always figured they’d get a deal done.  The rules were always pretty loose to begin with. The deadline was November 23 – but the deadline doesn’t really mean anything. All the deadline requires is a deal that will be sent to the full House and Senate for an up or down vote in December. The deal doesn’t have to be a good one, or even one that anyone can deal with. As long as it’s voted on, the debt ceiling increases are triggered. And even if it stinks, there’s still a year to fix it before any of the really bad stuff happens in January of 2013. Granted, it may not stop the markets from tanking and our credit rating from being lowered again, but the really bad stuff was delayed.

We’re not talking about a huge amount of money here either. The cuts simply need to be $1.2 trillion over 10 years – or $120 billion a year. When our debt sits at $15 trillion and rising, and the budget deficit itself is now in the trillions, those kinds of cuts shouldn’t be impossible. Same with revenue. There are ways to raise revenue that don’t have to involve tax increases, even on the richest 1%.

I noticed the subtle shift in the talking points in the middle of last week. I was eating lunch with a member of Congress last week and they told me that the Speaker had started referring to the debt committee and Republican goals in the past tense – he’d always referred to it in the future tense before. And a Democratic colleague told me a similar story, too. In the span of a few days, all hope seemed to vanish.

I, along with many others, had hopes that something would get done. That the across the board cuts that automatic sequestration would cause would be scary enough to the 11 men and 1 woman on the supercommittee that they would work to get a deal done. That somehow, politics in this country hadn’t become as dysfunctional as everyone seems to think it has become.

Part of me has that hope still – the hope that at the last minute, something gets done. This is the same part of me that still had hope last night that Graham Gano might actually make a 52 yard field goal, the same hope that next season the Orioles might get out of the cellar, the same hope that I have that somebody can beat Barack Obama next year. But my reason keeps getting in the way.

The Committee didn’t have to fail. But as I sit here, Monday morning, knowing that a deal needs to be finalized today and time is running out, I’m disappointed.

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