Not so super-duper

Members of the congressional deficit-reduction “supercommittee” said Monday they had failed to reach an agreement on slashing the U.S. deficit by at least $1.2 trillion. That failure will supposedly trigger mandatory cuts to military spending and some social programs, starting in 2013.

Or, perhaps, when pigs fly.

“The defeat is the latest sign of how hard it has been for Washington’s political class to come up with unpopular tax increases or spending cuts to rein in budget deficits that have totaled about $1.3 trillion or more over the last three fiscal years,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Really? Let us recall what got us to this pass. Back on July 31, Americans were told Washington insiders had reached a “historic compromise” to raise the federal government’s so-called “debt limit.” Any member of Congress who wanted to limit the federal government’s borrowing and spending had in hand, at that point, the mechanism to make that happen: simply vote against any deal to hike the debt ceiling.

Instead, so-called fiscally responsible conservatives agreed to raise the borrow-and-spend ceiling, in exchange for a highly colorful and impressive handful of magic beans.

What were those beans?

As their first magic bean, Washington’s big spenders agreed to hold a vote on a balanced-budget amendment. An unwise version which Democrats should have loved — it set no cap on spending; it set no supermajority requirement for future tax hikes — drew only 25 Democratic votes and failed to advance out of the House of Representatives last week.

Impressed?

The second magic bean was the “supercommittee,” which just “failed” — assuming anyone in the know ever intended it to do anything else. In recent weeks, members seemed to spend more time positioning themselves to blame the opposition, than buying additional red magic markers to cross out more federal expenditures on their budget sheets.

Democrats accused Republicans of refusing to “raise taxes on the rich,” of course.

In fact, Republicans were wise to turn down proposals which would have cemented huge and permanent job-destroying tax hikes immediately, in exchange for feeble promises of spending cuts “to be phased in.”

So now we’re down to the third and last magic bean.

Will even the modest promised “mandatory spending cuts” (remember, they’re really just reductions in proposed increases) kick in as threatened, 13 months from now?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., promptly said he wouldn’t reverse the cuts. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has said that he would feel “morally bound” to honor the cuts. President Barack Obama said he would veto any bill to undo the cuts, saying there would be “no easy off ramps.”

Which sounds a lot like an administrator at Penn State saying he sees no reason to resign, these days.