Supercommittee doing what it was designed to do: fail

The Super­com­mit­tee has dead­locked and will not be able to release a bud­get with the required $1.2 tril­lion in cuts that would avoid seques­tra­tion. (Full dis­clo­sure: two weeks ago I heard, through unnamed sources on Capi­tol Hill, that seques­tra­tion is unavoid­able, so my cyn­i­cism is not entirely unfounded, although it will have to go with­out attribution.)

The Super­com­mit­tee was never designed to suc­ceed: it was designed as a win-​win for Obama. Either the Repub­li­cans stonewall on the Democrat’s tax hikes and future cuts to Medicare and Med­ic­aid that would be imple­mented by some­one who is not Obama, or the Com­mit­tee would dead­lock — and Repub­li­cans would be the do-​nothing party. We would either infu­ri­ate our own base and let the Democ­rats paint us as Democrats-​lite, or we would be smeared for not compromising.

Michael Gra­ham quotes from Rea­son about the sham of the Super­com­mit­tee: as the 10-​year cuts are lower than the annual deficit, the Com­mit­tee could never really “suc­ceed” in bring­ing fed­eral spend­ing in line with fed­eral income, no more than a bas­ket­ball team that is down by 30 could suc­ceed in win­ning the game by exe­cut­ing exactly one play designed to give them exactly one lay-​up.

The Cato Insti­tute explains that the pur­pose of the Super­com­mit­tee was all about increas­ing spend­ing, not decreas­ing the deficit:

Repub­li­cans are con­sid­er­ing a sur­ren­der on taxes because they are afraid that a dead­lock will lead to a sequester, which would mean auto­matic bud­get sav­ings. And the sequester, accord­ing to these politi­cians, would “cut” the bud­get too severely.

But as the chart illus­trates, that is utter nonsense.

There are only bud­get cuts if you use dis­hon­est Wash­ing­ton bud­get math, which mag­i­cally turns spend­ing increases into spend­ing cuts sim­ply because the bur­den of gov­ern­ment isn’t expand­ing even faster.

If we use hon­est math, we can see what this debate is really about. Should we raise taxes so that gov­ern­ment spend­ing can grow by more than $2 tril­lion over the next 10 years?

Or should we have a sequester so that the bur­den of fed­eral spend­ing climbs by “only” $2 trillion?

Any­one who thinks that the Super­com­mitt­tee is about any­thing besides assign­ing blame is men­tal. This was all about either get­ting the Obama agenda through and blam­ing Repub­li­cans for it (because the vot­ers do not want more taxes, more spend­ing, more gov­ern­ment, and less restraint), or blam­ing Repub­li­cans for not “reduc­ing the deficit.” The Repub­li­cans chose the lesser of two evils: refus­ing to “com­pro­mise” by, in the words of Mark Steyn, agree­ing to head towards a cliff at 30 mph instead of 60 mph.