Does anyone need any additional evidence that our political system is completely broken? The bipartisan congressional supercommittee that was given two months to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade has failed to reach an agreement. It is an epic failure and a national embarrassment. The truth is that they never even came close to an agreement. In fact, as you will read below, the two sides on the panel have been barely even talking to each other. In the end, the supercommittee was a super joke. Meanwhile, the U.S. national debt has passed the 15 trillion dollar mark and we are facing trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. We are heading directly for a national financial disaster, and our "leaders" seem powerless to do anything about it.
According to the supercommittee's rules, any plan would have had to have been submitted to the Congressional Budget Office by Monday in order to give the CBO 48 hours to analyze how much the plan would reduce budget deficits over the coming decade.
When the supercommittee was announced, it made headlines all over the world, but now it is ending with a whimper.
The supercommittee was never a good idea in the first place, but you would have thought that they could have come up with something over the course of two months.
But instead all they are giving us are a whole bunch of excuses and a whole lot of hot air.
What a joke.
Is it really that difficult to come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts over a decade?
It isn't as if they would even be cutting very deeply. $1.2 trillion in cuts would not even cut the budget by $150 billion a year. We would still be talking about trillion dollar deficits way into the future.
But instead of agreeing to some token cuts, they have chosen to do nothing and to blame each other.
So now $1.2 trillion in "automatic budget cuts" will go into effect starting in 2013. But even that $1.2 trillion figure contains a lot of "fuzzy math". For example, it includes $169 billion in "projected savings" from "reduced interest costs" on the national debt.
I would love to see how they came up with that figure.
In any event, the truth is that none of these numbers really matter at all.
Why?
None of the budget cuts go into effect until after the 2012 election. That means that this Congress can vote to repeal the automatic cuts well before then.
Some in Congress are already pushing for this. For example, U.S. Senator John McCain said the following recently....
Click here for complete article:http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/epic-failure-the-supercommittee-was-a-super-joke