The “Supercongress” failed today, as pretty much anybody with an existing EEG could have told you. Who would have thought that after a Congress full of people with vastly different ideas about how to fix the budget failed, a smaller group of Congressional leaders with vastly different ideas about how to fix the deficit would also fail. The only real way that the Supercongress could have worked is if the goal were to get the number of people down to such a small amount that the brain scramblers from Men In Black would work.
Frankly, failure was the best thing that could have come out with this. Actually, this failure is a good start, but if you really care about deficit reduction, you are hoping that regular Congress does nothing but play Ultimate Frisbee on the Capitol Mall until 2013. Doing absolutely nothing, thereby letting the Bush tax cuts expire, would do more to fix the deficit than anything this committee could have come up with. Plus, despite what Congressional leaders and President Obama say, changing the “trigger” is always an option. A current legislature can’t bind a future legislature through statute, as much as people repeatedly try to do so.
Apparently, the lack of a deal caused the stock market to drop. Really? Either the financial wizards who run the world didn’t price into the market something as certain as the sun rising in the east, or the market just acts irrationally with or without regard to external news. Either way, it doesn’t make the “experts” look right. The most believable explanation is that the market knows this will lead to expansion-crippling austerity, just like the rest of Europe.
Good riddance to the Supercongress. I look forward to the next edition of the “Duh” files: keeping the Euro together requires rich countries subsidizing poor countries? Who knew?!