Congressional Super-Committee Expected to Announce Debt-Deal Failure Today – 11/21/11

This is why it will take a Republican President, and a Republican House and Senate to ever really tackle this mess. Democrats owe their existence to the giveaways, and they are not going to agree to stop passing out the candy. Their voting base demands the giveaways, and it is political suicide for them to cut spending in any significant way.

For Republicans to ever deal with the problem, they will have to be constrained by a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If they don’t have to cut spending significantly – they won’t either.

WASHINGTON POST: A debt-reduction committee with special powers that was supposed to dissolve congressional gridlock in Washington is instead on the brink of failure, setting the stage for $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts.

The 12-member bipartisan supercommittee likely will announce today that it can’t reach agreement on deficit savings, according to a Democratic aide. The aide, who wasn’t authorized to discuss internal matters publicly and requested not to be identified, said in an e-mail that it was highly unlikely that the committee’s talks could be salvaged.

Today is the deadline for the Congressional Budget Office to receive information for scoring a proposal in advance of the supercommittee’s Nov. 23 target date for reaching a deal. Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has declared over the past few months that failure is “not an option” for the panel, created in August after rancorous debate over raising the nation’s borrowing limit that plunged congressional approval ratings to lows of between 9 percent and 14 percent.

Both parties took to the airwaves yesterday to blame the other for the lack of an agreement, though they stopped short of saying the talks had failed. Democrats faulted Republicans for refusing to budge on an anti-tax pledge and Republicans accused Democrats of rejecting their latest offer to raise revenue along with spending cuts. . . . Read More