RIP Supercommittee

by digby

My new post at Al Jazeera is about the late, departed Super Committee. May it rest in peace:

So we reach the end of yet another lengthy deficit reduction negotiation, and all signs at this writing point to failure.

This is actually very good news, although to hear the pundits tell it, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be trampling down the doors of the New York Stock Exchange and everyone in the US will soon be force-fed poisoned baklava at gunpoint. Indeed, if you followed the financial and political press over the past couple of weeks, you would have thought the world would literally come to an end if this arbitrary deadline to cut an arbitrary percentage of the deficit isn’t met.

And yet, no deal means “sequestration” (also known as “the triggers”) will kick in, which will mean brutal cuts to discretionary spending and defence starting in 2013. If the goal is to cut $1.2tn in order to set the country’s fiscal house in order, why should all these deficit hawks care how the government gets there? Well, it turns out that this isn’t really about deficit reduction at all. The entire exercise is about gutting the social safety net, thus giving the markets “confidence” in the United States’ ability to govern itself.

Ironically, this was considered to be so important that our democratic government had to convene a secretive committee to meet behind closed doors and enact policies that go against the explicit desires of a vast majority of American citizens. read on

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