On the Money Trail
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The Supercommittee: Designed to Fail

by Al Jacobs, author of Nobody's Fool: A Skeptic's Guide to Prosperity

December 2011

On August 2, 2011, in response to congressional deadlock over a debt-ceiling limitation, the United States enacted the Budget Control Act of 2011, establishing, among other things, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, commonly referred to as the Supercommittee.  This committee’s charge: issuing recommendations by November 23, 2011, to reduce the nation’s deficit by no less than $1.2 trillion over a ten-year period.

The Supercommittee consisted of twelve members, all appointed by the leaders of the two major political parties.  To ensure perfect partisan balance, there were three members each of Republican and Democratic senators, and a like number each of Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives.

Though the recommendation-deadline-date arrived, no recommendations ever materialized.  A New York Times headline summed up the committee’s accomplishments in three words: “The Supercommittee Collapses.”  The Los Angeles Times expressed it a bit differently: “Deficit-Busting ‘Super Committee’ was Doomed to Failure.”

It took little time for spokesmen of the two parties to explain to the nation what went wrong.  President Obama attributed the failure to Republicans’ unwillingness to consider any tax increases.  Senator John Kerry (D-MA), a member of the committee, added “We simply could not overcome the Republican insistence on making tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent.”  By contrast, committee member Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) claimed Democrats “refused to agree to any meaningful deficit reduction without $1 trillion in job-crushing tax increases.”  Never at a loss for words, Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid (D-NV), blamed the Tea Party and Grover Norquist, spokesman for Americans for Tax Reform, contending that “For the good of our country the Democrats were prepared to strike a grand bargain that would make painful cuts while asking millionaires to pay their fair shair . . . but Republicans never came close to meeting us halfway.”  His counterpart in the House of Representatives, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), responded by claiming “President Obama and Washington Democrats insisted on dramatic tax hikes on American job creators, which would make our economy worse.”

In actuality, during the committee’s 114-day lifetime nothing but partisan dogma and illusive accusations ever emanated from its members.   In that time not a single mutually agreeable suggestion appeared, and I suspect this was intended by its founders from the start.  It’s my belief the Supercommittee did not exist to develop a sensible debt-reduction plan, but rather to act as a public distraction while the members of congress contrived among themselves quietly to further rig the system to favor their natural constituency groups.

I suppose the futility of the Supercommittee should have been obvious from the start, considering who became its members.  How could Congressman Christopher Van Hollen, (D, MD), who as a Maryland State Senator led efforts to raise taxes, prohibit oil drilling, and increase education and healthcare funding, find common ground with Senator Rob Portman (R, OH), who championed the elimination of capital gains taxes on homes and regards as his proudest moments the passage of a balanced budget amendment and welfare reform bill?

Another matter, relating to the assigned task of the Supercommittee, deserves consideration: Reduction of the national deficit by “no less than $1.2 trillion over a ten-year period,” or an average of $120 billion per year.  Is this meaningful, considering the most recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office of a $1.3 trillion deficit for 2011 fiscal year?  Thus, a yearly $120 billion savings represents only 9.2% of the total deficit.  This never deserved the hyperbole it received.

You may wonder where we go from here.  The August 2nd legislation provided for this contingency.  If the Supercommittee fails to come up with a program acceptable to the entire congress, automatic across-the-board reductions will kick in, trimming $1.2 trillion over nine years in which all areas of discretionary spending will be equally targeted.  Of course, as you might have expected, none of these automatic events are scheduled to occur until 2013—safely after the November 2012 elections.  Thus whoever controls the congress and the White House at that time will jockey to enact whatever laws they are able.  If the House, Senate, and Presidency is not fully in the hands of one party, as exists today, the haggling will continue.  In short, it’s anyone’s guess where we go from here.

I’ll conclude with an analogy.  The Supercommittee, which is now but a memory, brings to mind a tale from the 1960’s.  It too involved a proposal to form a committee to resolve various social problems gripping America at the time.  In keeping with attitudes then prevalent, composition of the committee mandated diversity.  A specious suggestion called for eight members to be selected, consisting of one person each from the following groups: a religious fanatic, a hardcore atheist, a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a member of the Black Panthers, a bomb-throwing anarchist, a representative of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a card-carrying member of MENSA, and an inmate from a nearby insane asylum.  The instructions under which this committee would function: “Come and let us reason together.”