Nothing ‘super’ about inability of committee to do its job

Perhaps nothing better encap- sulates the story of how compromise has become a dirty word between Democrats and Republicans in Washington than the congressional deficit reduction supercommittee’s inability thus far to reach an agreement.

A bipartisan 12-member committee that was born out of desperation was given three months to hash out a deal to cut $1.2 trillion from the nation’s budget deficit over the next 10 years. Over 10 years, Congress will appropriate about $40 trillion, so one might think that agreeing on some combination of tax increases and spending cuts that represent about 3 percent of the spending wouldn’t prove insurmountable.

Most folks who were given an ultimatum to figure a way of cutting their spending and/or increasing their income by 3 percent (and given a 10-year window in which to do it) would sharpen their pencils and get the job done. Many husbands and wives have already come to grips with personal financial challenges that involve far greater sacrifices in balancing their budgets than those facing Republicans and Democrats in Washington. And while we’ll grant that there are dramatic differences between balancing a household budget and balancing the federal budget, the most startling difference may be that families recognize when something has to be done and they do it. Politicians seem incapable of exhibiting the same sense of urgency — and it should be remembered that the supercommittee isn’t even being asked to balance the budget; it’s just being asked to make a marginal cut in the amount government will continue to borrow over the next decade.

The six Democrats and six Republicans on the supercommittee (half senators, half representatives) are entering the last week of negotiations offering no more assurance today than in August that they will be able to reach a compromise.

It begs the question: On a scale of 1 to 1.2 trillion, how dysfunctional is Congress?

A more ambitious target

Last year, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform chaired by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles struggled to put together a plan that would have saved $4 trillion over 10 years, but it failed to win the support of Democrats concerned with the level of entitlement cuts and Republicans who had taken a vow against new taxes.

But even a pessimist would have had reason to believe that a congressional supercommittee would be able to agree on a combination of cuts and revenue adjustments that totaled less than a third of the Simpson-Bowles proposal.

Perhaps not.

Whatever the supercommittee comes up with will have to pass the House and the Senate, so perhaps the leaders of those bodies can wield some influence on their members of the committee. House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., met Tuesday to discuss the progress — or lack thereof — of the supercommittee.

Since it is they who will have to deal with the consequences of a failure of the supercommittee to reach a workable compromise, perhaps they can work some magic.

If not, automatic spending cuts will be made that will affect — some say cripple — important segments of the government, including defense and entitlement programs.

But in a typical reflection of Congress’s apparent new vow — never do something today that you can put off till next year (by which time it may be someone else’s problem) — those cuts wouldn’t go into effect until 2013.

This is no way to run a nation, a least not if it is expected to remain a great nation.